Books by Tessa Hadley

The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: the stories focus in on crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists. an old friend brings bad news to a dinner party;

Rivalry, unruly desire and ugly secrets poison a family holiday in this gripping novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Late in the Day. 'Few writers give me such consistent pleasure' Zadie SmithFour siblings meet up in their grandparents' old house for three long, hot summer weeks.

Her fiance 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.

Stella was a clever girl, everyone thought so. Living with her mother and rather unsatisfactory stepfather in suburban respectability she reads voraciously, smokes until her voice is hoarse and dreams of a less ordinary life. But these things come at a price and one that Stella despite all her cleverness doesn't realise until it is too late.

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. 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...

Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.

An improbable coincidence brings Clare back into contact with someone she once had sex with at a teenage party; Clare is married with three small children, she bakes her own bread and buys her clothes from the charity shop. Clare's story is intertwined with other stories of her extended family.

Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way.