After the Funeral and Other Stories
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- $149.00
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- $149.00
Descripción editorial
A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships—Tessa Hadley is "one of the greatest stylists alive" (Ron Charles, Washington Post).
A Best Book of the Year: TIME, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue
“Hadley is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph.”—Lily King, New York Times best-selling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria
In each of these twelve stories, 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 recognize each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’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. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents 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 and Other Stories showcases what Colm Tóibín describes as "Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hadley (Free Love) proves herself a magician of short fiction with this wonderful collection featuring characters whose epiphanies shift their conception of their lives. Many of the stories feature POV switches, coincidental encounters, and other literary devices that might not have worked if Hadley weren't so good at capturing moments of startling strangeness. In "Cecelia Awakened," a teenager travels with her parents to Florence, Italy, where she realizes they're simply tourists—at once outlandish and utterly unoriginal. While checking into their hotel, she picks up a flash of disdain from the manager directed at her father ("It was as if Cecelia had heard distinctly, in a moment when no one else was actually speaking, idle thought: Fussy little man"). In "Dido's Lament," a Londoner named Lynette quite literally bumps into her ex-husband, Toby, on the subway. A power play ensues when Toby invites Lynette to visit his new house. After Lynette leaves, Hadley shifts to Toby's perspective, where in his shame he has an unsettling thought about his new family and success. "The Other One" follows a girl whose grief over her father's death via car accident becomes complicated when it comes out that he was driving with his mistress and her female friend. Many years later, at a dinner party, the girl (now a woman) believes she has bumped into the mistress's friend, the eponymous "other one," toward whom she feels oddly warm. Readers will marvel over these twisty and masterly tales.
