Accidents in the Home

From the author of The Past, Tessa Hadley's first novel now rejacketed for a whole new audienceAn improbable coincidence brings Clare back into contact with someone she once had sex with at a teenage party; complicatedly, he is now going out with her best friend, Helly. The encounter needn't have meant anything - it could just have been funny, or embarrassing - but it seems to have the power to shake up everything in Clare's life. Clare is married with three small children, she bakes her own bread and buys her clothes from the charity shop. Helly is an actress and has her golden curves pasted up on billboards ten foot high. And each of them seems to want what the other has. Clare's story is intertwined with other stories of her extended family. Her father has been married three times and left a trail of children. Accidents in the Home dips in and out of the lives of this complicated, close, fraught family, reaching out into the past for explanation and illumination as well as across the present. It is the debut of a quite formidable fictional talent.

“"Surprising and rewarding…Hadley has pulled off an important and tricky task…. Not many books remind you so directly and forcefully that reading is about creating new ways of seeing the world." -New York Times Book Review”

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
Surprising and rewarding... Hadley has pulled off an important and tricky task... Not many books remind you so directly and forcefully that reading is about creating new ways of seeing the world New York Times
Charts with intelligence, humour and unflinching perception the way we mostly fail to realise how we have to live Times Literary Supplement
In clear prose that gorgeously fixes nuances so evanescent as to be rare, the novel unfolds an artful, inventive spectrum of opportunity and love - Tessa Hadley is that rare writer who has the convictions of her ambitions Observer

Tessa Hadley is the author of eight 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, The Past, Late in the Day, Free Love and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

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