Tessa Hadley’s previous book, The London Train, was one of the best novels of last year, though overlooked by prize committees. It concerned the gently disentangling lives of a pair of middle-class couples, and found its strengths in numinous revelations of the everyday.
These short stories (all previously printed in magazines such as Granta and The New Yorker) explore, with a questioning intelligence, a mostly similar territory. Here people try to shore up their lives as best they can in the face of vicissitudes. They do so by reaching out to others, often in the face of convention; and by trying to square life with the worlds that they create in their heads, and that are created around them in the forms of fiction.
Hadley is intently aware of her characters’ responses to imagined worlds — from the cave paintings at Lascaux, in the subtle ‘In the Cave’, to a film made by a character’s deceased husband in ‘Post-production’.
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