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Biographical note
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.Few writers give me such consistent pleasure
- Zadie Smith,
She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today
- Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie,
As discrete entities, Hadley’s short stories are intense, miniature novels in themselves; bound together in a novel, they become quietly brilliant, offering an incisive exploration into how life’s individuals episodes add up to a meaningful whole.
- Francesca Angelini, Sunday Times
Hadley is a writer of exceptional intelligence and skill and, for all the apparent conventionality of her vision, hers is a subtly subversive talent.
- Edmund Gordon, Observer
There is something reassuring yet deliciously unexpected about a Tessa Hadley novel.
- Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph
The most astute and sympathetic of writers.
- Susanna Rustin, Guardian
This novel is the life story of an ordinary, middle-aged woman – Stella. Only that she is not ordinary because Tessa Hadley is writing her into existence and is behind her like a following wind… Hadley writes as a masterly illustrator might draw.
- Kate Kellaway, Observer
Hadley’s achievement in her fifth novel is to express a life significantly shaped and often constrained by discomfort – physical, mental, emotional – but a life that nonetheless progresses, mutating from circumstance to circumstance, decade to decade.
- Alex Clark, Times Literary Supplement
Hadley…has a genius for pithy analysis.
- Matthew Dennison, The Times
Gorgeously erudite prose.
- Catherine Taylor, Sunday Telegraph
The fifth novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Free Love, The Past and Late in the Day, Clever Girl is a tale of an ordinary life made extraordinary by the gifts of Tessa Hadley.
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. When she meets Val, he seems to her to embody everything she longs for - glamour, ideas, excitement and the thrill of the unknown. But these things come at a price and one that Stella despite all her cleverness doesn't realise until it is too late.
'Tessa Hadley writes like a dream' Daily Mail