The Past

One of the best novels of 2016. – Ron Charles * Washington Post *I find Tessa Hadley’s work genuinely helpful, especially when it comes to the big subjects: love and marriage, the political versus the personal, children, friendship. And then there are the sentences themselves, so precise and beautiful, often sly, sometimes devastating, always expertly paced. 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 Ngozi AdichieA new Tessa Hadley is a pleasure to be savoured… The Past is a hugely enjoyable and keenly intelligent novel, brimming with the vitality of unruly desire. – Sameer Rahim, four stars * Daily Telegraph *Hadley is an exquisite writer, with a fine eye for detail and a way of crafting sentences that make you stop and inhale * The Times *Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts. – Hilary MantelTessa Hadley has become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them. – Anthony Quinn * Guardian *My favourite contemporary novelist… Nobody explores the mystery of relationships better than Hadley. – Deborah MoggachA masterful novel * Spectator *Tessa Hadley is funny, precise, sensuous, and one of the best writers of family life that you are ever likely to encounter – simultaneously sympathetic and penetrating * Daily Mail Books of the Year *

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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