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  • Published: 5 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9781446496435
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Married Love

'One of the most subtle and sublime contemporary writers' Vogue




Tessa Hadley has joined the ranks of Posy Simmonds, Helen Simpson, Colm Toibin, Katherine Mansfield and Rachel Cusk as a national treasure.

The new collection of short stories from award-winning author 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.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 collection to treasure.

  • Published: 5 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9781446496435
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

Tessa Hadley

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.

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Praise for Married Love

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

Accomplished ... confident

Sunday Times

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure

Zadie Smith

Hadley is a writer of exceptional intelligence and skill Only Alice Munro and Colm Toibin, among all the working short story writers I’m aware of, are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. With Married Love, Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys

Observer

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

The Times

One of the most subtle and sublime contemporary writers

Vogue

She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

Tessa Hadley writes like a dream, the prose precise, but funny, too

Daily Mail

The ghost of Katherine Mansfield hovers lightly over these deceptively delicate snapshots which zero in on the much maligned territory of the domestic and make it new and vital again

Metro

The most perceptive chronicler since George Eliot of avid, unworldly young women

Guardian

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

These stories are shored up with sentences and paragraphs that demand immediate re-reading for their cleverness and warmth…This party is well worth attending

Independent

This collection shows a writer quietly growing in style, perception and grace. She conveys to the reader that rare ability to see completely into someone else’s head

Spectator