Free Love: A Novel

Tessa Hadley

Harper

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 home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach. Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.

Sunstroke and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Vintage Books USA

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate's forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother in Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it's because she's bored and hasn't got anything else to do, but she can't stop. David is married, rational, dependable: the last type to want an affair. David's marriage isn't as solid as it looks, though.His wife Suzie has moved out of their bedroom, she avoids talking to David or spending time at home with him and their children, she has made new friends who smoke dope and believe in fortune telling. David takes refuge in Firenze, where he can talk to Kate about music. David's seventeen-year-old son Jamie is also drawn to the old house full of books and history. He is more like Kate than his father is, bookish and clever: he wants to find out all about life from her. He turns up one night at Firenze, drunk and desperate. Tessa Hadley's intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, lovers and friends; the past casts its long shadows in the present; men and women who were once confident they knew themselves, learn to attend to the changes unfolding inside them.

Master Bedroom

Literary

SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES

JONATHAN CAPE.

The Past

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

Free Love: The exhilarating new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Late in the Day

Free Love

Random House of Canada

Genre Fiction

Vintage

Late In The Day

<p>The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in this Sunday Times bestselling novelAlex and Christine and Zach and Lydia have been inseparable since their twenties. From student house-shares and grubby pubs to proper homes and grown-up careers, the two couples lives have been interlinked for decades. Then one evening, Alex and Christine receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of their loss bringing them closer, the three of them find that love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness as old entanglements and resentments rise from the past.'A fine-grained novel of friendship, loss and jealousy' Sunday Times, *100 Great 21-Century Novels*</p>

Late in the Day

<p>Discover the seductive novel about one woman's sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London from the bestselling author of Late in the Day .1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional 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.But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother.With scalpel-sharp insight, Tessa Hadley explores her characters' inner worlds, laying bare their fears and longings. Free Love is an irresistible exploration of romantic love, sexual freedom and living out the truest and most meaningful version of our lives.'Tessa Hadley might be my new favourite writer. She just 'gets' people, their flaws, their ignoble impulses, the transcendent moments... she is wonderful.' Marian Keyes, author of Again, Rachel</p>

After the Funeral

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Books by Tessa Hadley