Tessa Hadley – författare

Den här asken rymmer fyra noveller om drömmar. Här hittar du förutom en helt nyskriven novell av den prisbelönta författaren Kristina Sandberg, även hyllade novellstjärnan Tessa Hadleys berättelse ”Solsting” för första gången på svenska. Dessutom bjuds det på ett glimrande smakprov på Jane Austens karaktäristiska humor och en underfundig berättelse signerad Virginia Woolf.

Med humor, värme och omsorg om de små detaljerna skildrar de fyra författarna på olika sätt drömmar och hur dessa faktiskt kan bli verklighet – oavsett om det handlar om kärlek, välstånd eller bara om att få något mer i livet.

Asken innehåller fyra böcker:Kristina Sandberg – KvarlåtenskaperJane Austen – Tre systrarVirginia Woolf – Änkan och papegojanTessa Hadley – Solsting

Fyra syskon semestrar i sin barndoms sommarstuga. Roland kommer med sin nya fru som systrarna inte tycker om. Alice har med sig en gammal kärleks tonårsson som smider planer att förföra Rolands dotter. Fran kommer utan sin man som prioriterat turné med bandet. Och äldsta systern Harriet får sin självbild sönderslagen när passionen slår till. Nuet och det förflutna glider in i och påverkar varandra tills allt är förändrat.

En ny fängslande roman om en kvinnas sexuella och intellektuella uppvaknande i 60-talets swinging London av författaren till "Syskonen" och "Sent på dagen".

1967. Medan London vaknar till liv av den nya ungdomsrevolutionen verkar förortsfamiljen Fischer tillhöra en äldre värld av konventionell stabilitet: den vackra och plikttrogna hemmafrun Phyllis är gift med Roger, en hängiven pappa med en karriär i utrikesdepartementet.

Men när en gammal väns tjugoåriga son kommer hem till familjen en varm sommarkväll och kysser Phyllis i den mörka trädgården efter middagen, händer något inom henne. I detta uppvaknande gör Phyllis ett val som går emot alla förväntningar på henne som hustru och mamma.

Med skalpellskarp insikt utforskar Tessa Hadley sina karaktärers inre världar och avslöjar deras rädslor och längtan. Med de vågade och sensuella undertonerna är Fri kärlek en oemotståndlig utforskning av romantisk kärlek, sexuell frihet och att leva ut den mest sanna och meningsfulla versionen av oss själva. Det är en roman som visar prov på Hadleys enastående förmåga att ”skriva om medvetandet så innerligt, fullt ut, att det höjer och utökar ens eget”. (Lily King, författare till Euphoria.)

Twolives, stretched between two cities, converge in a chance meeting withimmediate and far-reaching consequences in this compelling, sophisticated talefrom acclaimed New Yorker writer Tessa Hadley, author of Accidents inthe Home and The Master Bedroom. As father struggles to reestablisha relationship with his estranged daughter in London, surrendering himself toan underground life of illegal squats and counterculture friendships, a wifedecides she must flee her suffocating marriage to return to Wales, where inCardiff she may rediscover the passions that once fueled her life. Embracingchange and facing loss, in a story evocative of Alice Munro’s Runaway andJulia Glass’ I See You Everywhere, Hadley’s powerful charactersilluminate the furthest reaches of love, hope, and determination.

Clever Girl is an indelible story of one woman’s life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain’s leading literary lights—Tessa Hadley—the author of the New York Times Notable Books Married Love and The London Train.

Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives—an ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.

Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley’s moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.

Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama—violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley’s observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.

Winner of the Windham Campbell Prize • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A Time Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Top 10 Book of the Year • A Huffington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Editors’ Choice

In her most accessible, commercial novel yet, the “supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence (New York Times Book Review) turns her astute eye to a dramatic family reunion, where simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over three long, hot summer weeks.

With five novels and two collections of stories, Tessa Hadley has earned a reputation as a fiction writer of remarkable gifts. She brings all of her considerable skill and an irresistible setup to The Past, a novel in which three sisters, a brother, and their children assemble at their country house.

These three weeks may be their last time there; the upkeep is prohibitive, and they may be forced to sell this beloved house filled with memories of their shared past (their mother took them there to live when she left their father). Yet beneath the idyllic pastoral surface, hidden passions, devastating secrets, and dangerous hostilities threaten to consume them.

Sophisticated and sleek, Roland’s new wife (his third) arouses his sisters’ jealousies and insecurities. Kasim, the twenty-year-old son of Alice’s ex-boyfriend, becomes enchanted with Molly, Roland’s sixteen-year-old daughter. Fran’s young children make an unsettling discovery in a dilapidated cottage in the woods that shatters their innocence. Passion erupts where it’s least expected, leveling the quiet self-possession of Harriet, the eldest sister.

Over the course of this summer holiday, the family’s stories and silences intertwine, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life—bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican—winds down to its inevitable end.

With subtle precision and deep compassion, Tessa Hadley brilliantly evokes a brewing storm of lust and envy, the indelible connections of memory and affection, the fierce, nostalgic beauty of the natural world, and the shifting currents of history running beneath the surface of these seemingly steady lives. The result is a novel of breathtaking skill and scope that showcases this major writer’s extraordinary talents.

Winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

An NPR Best Book of the Year

The award-winning author of The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" (Washington Post), in a collection of stories that elevate the mundane into the exceptional.

The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proven herself to be the champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket.

Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists.

A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Tessa Hadley "puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).

“With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post

New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice |A Parnassus First Editions Club Pick | Powell’s Indispensable Book Club Pick | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Slate Best Book of the Year | A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year | A Bookpage Best Book of the Year

The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who “recruits admirers with each book” (Hilary Mantel).Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead.

In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

Late in the Day explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again “crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural” (Washington Post).

“Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts.”—Hilary Mantel

From Tessa Hadley, the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past—“one of the greatest stylists alive” (Washington Post)—an enthralling novel that skillfully portrays the dissolution of a family in 1960s England.

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, bookish teenager Colette, golden boy Hugh, and Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. But when the young son of an old friend comes for dinner, and they all drink too much, and at some point in the dark garden the young man kisses Phyllis, something in this bourgeois housewife catches fire. 

In Free Love Tessa Hadley turns her gaze to the intimate dynamic of a family transformed by betrayal. Hugh closes his mind against his mother, while Colette wants to follow her, in pursuit of her own adventure. And meanwhile there are secrets buried in Roger''s past which make Phyllis''s acts more entangling and threatening than she could ever have imagined. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the Fischers’ upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them. With scalpel-sharp insight, Hadley explores the depths of her characters’ interior lives, capturing “the fleeting emotion, the passing, indefinable perception or tiny epiphany” (Wall Street Journal).