Clever Girl

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure – Zadie SmithShe has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today – Chimamanda Ngozie AdichieAs discrete entities, Hadley’s short stories are intense, miniature novels in themselves; bound together in a novel, they become quietly brilliant, offering an incisive exploration into how life’s individuals episodes add up to a meaningful whole. – Francesca Angelini * Sunday Times *Hadley is a writer of exceptional intelligence and skill and, for all the apparent conventionality of her vision, hers is a subtly subversive talent. – Edmund Gordon * Observer *There is something reassuring yet deliciously unexpected about a Tessa Hadley novel. – Helen Brown * Daily Telegraph *The most astute and sympathetic of writers. – Susanna Rustin * Guardian *This novel is the life story of an ordinary, middle-aged woman – Stella. Only that she is not ordinary because Tessa Hadley is writing her into existence and is behind her like a following wind… Hadley writes as a masterly illustrator might draw. – Kate Kellaway * Observer *Hadley’s achievement in her fifth novel is to express a life significantly shaped and often constrained by discomfort – physical, mental, emotional – but a life that nonetheless progresses, mutating from circumstance to circumstance, decade to decade. – Alex Clark * Times Literary Supplement *Hadley…has a genius for pithy analysis. – Matthew Dennison * The Times *Gorgeously erudite prose. – Catherine Taylor * Sunday Telegraph *

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 and Free Love, and four collections of stories: Sunstroke, Married Love, Bad Dreams and After the Funeral. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016 and she has twice been awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, for 2018 and for 2024. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

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