Married Love

“Filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class, conducted with symphonic intensity and complexity. . . . Extraordinarily well-made.” —New York Times Book Review

Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today’s most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships.

Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents’ party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets.

Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect.

“Hadley parses the meaning of love in all its paradoxical, panoramic glory.” —Booklist

“These stories are gemlike and unforgettable.” —Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

“One of the most interesting writers around.” —Philip Womack, The Spectator

“Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin . . . are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. . . . Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys.” —Edmund Gordon, The Guardian

“There is a grand sweep and an emotional charge that brings to mind DH Lawrence.” —Elena Seymenliyska, Daily Telegraph (London))

“An exceptional storyteller.” —Library Journal

“Shrewd, insightful, unpredictable.” —Kirkus Reviews