After the Funeral

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 relationshipsIn 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.'

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, 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, 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, Tessa Hadley is my favourite author, She is one of the best fiction writers writing today

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.

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