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  • Published: 15 September 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099499268
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99

The Master Bedroom




From the author of The Past, Tessa Hadley’s third novel now rejacketed for a whole new audience

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate is forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother at 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.

Adapting to a new way of life, the connections Kate forges in her new home are to have painful consequences, as the past begins to cast its long shadow over the present...

  • Published: 15 September 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099499268
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99

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.

Also by Tessa Hadley

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Praise for The Master Bedroom

A luxuriant writer... the richness of her descriptions need only be matched by the imagination of the reader

Washington Times

Closely observed, beautifully written, generous, funny and true, Hadley's fiction is the real thing

Sunday Times

A sharp and a sexy read

Observer

A lovely, subtly teasing writer...Hadley's observations of the ebb and flow of female desire and frustration are reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, but she taps sensual undercurrents where Woolf wouldn't have dipped her toe

New York Times

Bewitching ...A prose stylist of quite outstanding talent with a gift for psychological acuity and an ability to encapsulate the human condition...As a writer, she is the real thing, utterly authentic in motive and achievement

Guardian

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure

Zadie Smith

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