Tessa Hadley

Assembling at their country house one final time before it is sold, four siblings and their children share past memories, hidden passions, and devastating secrets that threaten to overwhelm them.

"1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. When the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis...

"Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today's most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable...

In this New York Times Notable Book from one of today's most acclaimed writers, two lives stretched between two cities converge in a chance meeting that will irrevocably change their lives.

"Hadley is a supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence, someone who goes well beyond surfaces."—New York Times Book Review

Unsettled by the recent death of his mother, Paul sets out

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Lottie announces that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; it is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments.

"Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday...

"He had ruined her life... For years, he'd allowed himself to imagine she had forgotten Ben, or at least stopped remembering... What consolation could he give her now?" - From Devotion by Adam Haslett

In this compilation characters make choices that define their lives and suffer consequences often dire or disquieting. Abraham prepares to slay Isaac; siblings fall in love with the same man; a Thai man hides his secret guilt from his best

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