Married Love by Tessa Hadley

Married Love by Tessa Hadley

Lottie announces at the breakfast table 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 composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; her marriage to Edgar, the tiny flat they share, the children that follow. It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing new collection.

On full display in these stories are the qualities Tessa Hadley has been praised for often before: her unflinching examination of family relationships; her humour, warmth and psychological acuity; her powerful and precise prose. In this collection there are domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies - captured and distilled to remarkable effect.

Married Love is a collection to treasure, a masterful new work from one of the most accomplished storytellers of today.

The stories collected in Married Love tend to announced themselves with a crash.. before resolving into quieter reflections, like musical overtures in which strings follow brass. Whether it is in examining the mellowing of a marriage in the title piece, or recounting the progress of a one night stand ("In the Cave"), Hadley writes of ordinary lives with a gracefulness unequalled among her peers * Independent on Sunday *
Occasionally – very occasionally – a book feels like a gift, something unexpected, exhilarating, life-enhancing. Tessa Hadley’s second collection of short stories is such a book. -- Matthew Dennison * The Times *
Treats such as these should be taken one at a time – savoured and ruminated over as separate morsels... Tessa Hadley writes like a dream, the prose precise, but funny, too; her psychology always seems spot on and she draws us completely into the many different worlds we encounter here. -- John Harding * Daily Mail *
Hadley is a kind of serious literary version of the cartoonist Posy Simmonds – no middle class foible goes unobserved, and every emotion is traced back to its source. -- Kate Saunders * Out There Books *
The most perceptive chronicler since George Eliot of avid, unworldly young women. -- Alfred Hickling * Guardian *

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl and The Past, and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She lives in London and is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker and other magazines.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780224096423
ISBN 10	0224096427
Title	Married Love
Author	Tessa Hadley
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	2012-01-05
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.