Married Love
The incredible collection of short stories from award-winning author
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'The ghost of Katherine Mansfield hovers lightly over these deceptively delicate snapshots' Metro
A beguiling collection of short stories from award-winning author of Free Love, The Past and Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley.
Lottie announces at the breakfast table that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior.It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing collection to treasure.
'The most perceptive chronicler since George Eliot of avid, unworldly young women' Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Every story in this very English collection by New Yorker contributor Hadley (Accidents in the Home) juxtaposes the promise, even magnificence, of a rich inner life against the disappointing banality of everyday existence. In the title story, the author allows a willful girl to fling herself headlong into an ill-advised marriage, then makes us watch as all her pluck, all her potential, slowly dries up. In other stories, the author gives her characters refuge a fecund greenhouse, the city of Venice, a house remembered from childhood but ensures that they are not happy there, that each place is dark or rainy or infested with off-putting people. When Hadley sets a story ("In the Country") in the bucolic English countryside on a perfect summer weekend among the members of a loving family, it isn't long before her protagonist imagines being buried alive, "earth in her mouth and nose and ears... her flesh turning to a dry brown fertilising cake." Disillusion is Hadley's stock in trade. She is kind to the families she creates mothers and fathers especially are respected, even revered. But when she dissects them with her sharp instruments of observation, she strikes nerves that can cause pain.
