List Of Writers
HADLEY, TESSA
You can contact Tessa through her publishers, Jonathan Cape on: 0207 840 8400
Novelist and short story writer. Born in Bristol in 1956 and studied English Literature at Cambridge. Tessa has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University College and has lived in Cardiff since 1982. She has published three novels, one collection of stories, and a book on Henry James. Tessa is married and has three sons. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, specialising in ’Critical Reading’, ’3 Women Writers’, and ’The Novel’ and ’The Short Story’. Accidents in the Home (Cape, 2002) was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right (Cape, 2004) was shortlisted for the Encore Award and Sunstroke (Cape, 2007) is longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, Granta and other
magazines.
Tessa’s latest novel The Master Bedroom (Cape, 2007) is on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List. Click here for more information.
Reviews:
“…Hadley writes with an attention to detail that is not atomizing but empathetically expansive…”
Stephanie Cross, TLS
“…Distinguished by a dry humour and prose that often surprises but is never merely showy…”
Peter Parker, Sunday Times
“…It is as though 19th–century values – about the proper use of intelligence, perhaps, and of conversation – have been applied to contemporary ideas about desire. The result is very sexy. It is also exhilarating, as honest work can be…”
Anne Enright, Guardian
Selected Publications:
Accidents in the Home (Cape, 2002)
Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Everything Will Be All Right (Cape, 2004)
Sunstroke and Other Stories (Cape, 2007)
The Master Bedroom (Cape, 2007)
Contributed to:
Sea Stories (contributor) (National Maritime Museum, 2007)
Everything Will Be All Right (Cape, 2004)
England, just after the Second World War. Two sisters are bringing up their children in an old grey house on an estuary. Lil is a widow; Vera has a husband who keeps his suits in the wardrobe but spends time mysteriously at another house nearby. Lil’s daughter Joyce watches her mother and aunt, seeing that there is something missing in their lives: men. When Joyce’s daughter Zoe grows up and has a baby of her own, she proves impatient with domestic life, and chooses a very different path. Spanning five decades of extraordinary change in women’s lives, this novel explores the complicated relationships of one family. The young are sure that they can correct the mistakes of their parents. The truth, of course, is more opaque.
To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover
Sunstroke and Other Stories (Cape, 2007)
Ten substantial short stories capturing a wide range of female (and occasionally male) preoccupations and self–deceptions. A recurring theme in the stories is time, but the tone ranges widely from fearful experiences to emotional confusion to tenderness and humour.
To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover
The Master Bedroom (Cape, 2007)
Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Having given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother, she Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days. She begins to obsess about him, even though she knows it’s because she’s bored and hasn’t got anything else to do. David is married, rational, dependable: the last type to want an affair. This intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, lovers and friends; the past casts its long shadows in the present; men and women who were once confident they knew themselves, learn to attend to the changes unfolding inside them.
To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover