Author(s): Tessa Hadley

Short Stories

From the incomparable Tessa Hadley, a masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships. In each of the twelve stories in After the Funeral, small events have huge consequences.

Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognise each other.

Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age - everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife.

Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams.

A vital addition to Tessa Hadley's celebrated body of work, After the Funeral bears out Claire Messud's observation that 'Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift of making small canvases inexhaustibly new . . .

Compassionate and luminous, Hadley sees them all - or should I say, she sees us all- our travails, our fantasies and our small joys.'

Review: The stories in Tessa Hadley's new collection After the Funeral consistently pull you in from the first sentence... The capacity to make readers care from the off about what happens to these imaginary people next is an unquantifiable, indefinable talent that cannot be taught. You've got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it * Financial Times *
Beautifully done... the strongest stories resonate, offering glimpses of the hidden selves we all conceal * Sunday Times *
An absorbing and thoroughly readable fourth collection * Guardian *
One of our finest novelists... and is a short story supremo... It is hard to imagine stories more skilfully paced and polished than these * Observer *
After the Funeral is a brilliant collection. From the virtuosity of Hadley's technique to the clarity of her moral vision and the warmth of her humour, what she has achieved in After the Funeral is nothing short of masterful. Her stories are surprising, profound, and each feels as full as a world -- Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
Short stories tend to be literary Marmite, but the dozen tales in Hadley's classy new collection are a testament to the startling power of both their author and the form itself` * Mail on Sunday *
Hadley has elevated middle-class domesticity, and the emotional ripples beneath it, into the realms of high art... her depictions of buried disappointment and quiet yearning are timeless... A reminder of just how sublime an experience reading a Tessa Hadley book is * i *
Hadley is fantastically inventive... a magnificent collection * Daily Telegraph *
Told with elegance and ease, and burnished with a winning turn of phrase, her psychologically astute assessments of her (mostly) middle-class characters make these stories thrum with empathic emotional energy * Daily Mail *
Hadley has mastered the art of illuminating those brief, commonplace domestic moments which pass without fanfare but create ripples which never subside... Irresistible fiction * Big Issue, *Summer Reads of 2023* *
Any publication of hers, whether of short or long fiction, is cause for celebration for the pure pleasure of the prose * Financial Times *
Tessa Hadley is my favourite author -- Kate Atkinson, author of Shrines of Gaiety
I love Tessa Hadley's subtle, humane writing; no one understands better our inner lives, and the shifts of power and chance and desire which shape us -- Charlotte Mendelson, author of The Exhibitionist
Tessa Hadley might be my new favourite writer. She just "gets" people, their flaws, their ignoble impulses, the transcendent moments -- Marian Keyes, author of Grown Ups
Tessa Hadley is my inspiration, my literary thrill, and my solace all at once. She is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph -- Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers
Few writers since Elizabeth Bowen seem as able to slip so effortlessly between forms, and few have such precision and sheer command - on a tonal and emotional level, at the level of each sentence, and of the short story form. Tessa Hadley's stories are written with a captivating ease. As one of her own characters says of Madame Bovary, there is a ferocious pure aim to Hadley's words that goes right to the heart - of each story, and of this reader. She is truly a great writer and this is a stunning collection -- Lucy Caldwell, author of Intimacies
She is one of the best fiction writers writing today -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah
What a peerless writer Tessa Hadley is! I so enjoyed these beguiling, subtle stories, each one suggesting a world that lives long after one's closed the book -- Deborah Moggach, author of These Foolish Things
Hadley takes on her subjects with such grace and insight, that reading her work makes you want to take notes on human behaviour. After the Funeral is magnetic, subtle and full of tensile strength -- Nikita Lalwani, author of You People
Few writers give me such consistent pleasure -- Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth
Another showcase for Hadley's virtuosity... After the Funeral is a revelation for aficionados of the form, as vibrant and knowing as the best of Hadley's celebrated career * Washington Post *
A consummate storyteller, equally at home writing novels and short stories, Tessa Hadley possesses a brilliance that is hard to overstate. It's a pleasure to welcome After the Funeral, her twelfth book in just over twenty years, which is exactly as one hoped it would be: impeccably literary, emotionally satisfying, yet unexpectedly unsettling... Harkening to a range of contemporaries (Henry James, Muriel Spark, and Elizabeth Bowen as well as Zadie Smith and Alice Munro), Hadley always delivers fiction that cuts to the quick * Boston Globe *
Hadley writes the kind of books that many people think are easy to write-we're overrun with domestic novels about relationships, family, tragedy, life complications, the kind of events and dynamics that everyone has experience with. But Hadley, unlike most people, has the ability to evoke the depth and complexity that life truly holds * Lit Hub *
Good short stories are complete and satisfying in themselves while leaving open the possibility of a continuing storyline; Hadley's stories do both very well * Library Journal *
Hadley forensically lays bare people's foibles and frailties, but always with empathy * Red *
The mastery she has honed over a decades-long career makes Hadley's gaze as sharp as her empathy is expansive; each tale feels as satisfying as a full-length novel * Kirkus Reviews, *Starred* *
Hadley proves herself a magician of short fiction with this wonderful collection featuring characters whose epiphanies shift their conception of their lives... Readers will marvel over these twisty and masterly tales * Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review* *
The work of a singular talent... These are captivating stories, rich in character and fine-grained detail... Hadley entertains while offering shrewd, subtle insights into how we tick and the ties that bind us * Minneapolis Star Tribune *
Every word is perfection in this short-story collection from the critically acclaimed Hadley, who excels at writing about the small earthquakes that shake up ordinary lives * Good Housekeeping *
Effortlessly easy to read... and underpinned by meticulous thought and notices... The stories in After the Funeral are a triumph * Literary Review *

Author Biography: 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.