An author who makes her work her own genre. Because its plots move between intimacy, a point of suspense, domestic existentialism and vital action between dilemmas and paths that the characters assume with that point of adventure that is life itself.
So we met Tessa Hadley (not to be confused with the also writer Tessa Dancey) is to allow ourselves to be carried away towards a very particular literature where the proximity of its protagonists, plus the uncompromising approaches towards the deepest interiorities of the familiar, end up making us inhabit the stories like those omniscient ghosts that know everything. Readers in that fourth dimension like Big Brother. The point is that you will not be able to detach yourself from that glass from which everything that happens is observed with the simple, and at the same time fascinating, attraction of everyday suspense.
Top 3 recommended novels by Tessa Hadley
What's left of light
It's simple, in odd numbers there is no balance. Even more so in an environment of couples that suddenly becomes a triangle where edges protrude between tighter angles. The mathematics of coexistence under the same roof. The worst and… however, also the best towards a strange exorcism that arises from the paradoxical situation.
They have been inseparable friends for thirty years. Christine, the discreet painter; her husband Alex, a cursed poet in his youth and now a school principal; the successful art dealer Zachary and his extravagant wife Lydia.
One peaceful summer night Christine and Alex receive a call; It's Lydia, upset, from the hospital: Zach just died. The same feeling invades the three: they have lost the most generous and strongest of the four, the anchor that held them together, precisely the one whom they could not afford to lose. Heartbroken, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine, and in the months that follow, the loss, far from strengthening their bonds, brings to the surface old desires and grievances until now buried in the balance provided by the squareness of their friendship.
Free love
Free love is a frontier to overcome against the ego of the most conventional couple. And also in the face of remote convictions that fidelity is something almost spiritual that can even condemn you to some kind of hell. The point is that once immersed in that liberation, anything can happen. And there is no possibility of going back without ending up badly hurt, both egos and consciences.
At the Fischer home, everything is ready to receive a guest for dinner: young Nicholas, son of an old family friend. Until that hot night in 1967, neither Phyllis, an attractive forty-year-old housewife, nor her husband Roger, a diplomat at the Foreign Office, had stopped to question their life together, the portrait they composed of a conventional family of the London bourgeoisie. However, after dinner, in the gloomy garden, Nicholas kisses Phyllis, and for the first time she questions whether she is truly happy, and the foundations of the home begin to shake.
Attracted by this rebellious and bohemian-looking boy, Phyllis throws herself into a sentimental adventure that will allow her to explore her most intimate desires under the watchful eye of her daughter Colette, just a teenager about to enter adulthood. The experience will challenge the Fischers' worldview and reveal what is hidden behind the façade of appearances.
Free Love immerses us in the pulsating London of the late 60s, in which countercultural movements seethed in coexistence with bourgeois values, led by Phyllis, a woman who dares to challenge everything that is expected of her as a What a wife and mother. Elegant and subtle, after What Remains of Light, Tessa Hadley once again displays her mastery to explore psychological recesses, charge the everyday with meaning and create enveloping atmospheres in a novel that speaks of the expansive wave of our decisions.
On
At some point what we have experienced stops shaping who we are. At that moment the past closes, withdraws and is left alone to give melancholic glimpses, longings, some guilt and everything that is irrecoverable. From that moment he lives with what he is, which is nothing other than what remains from such an amalgam...
Like every summer, four brothers return to the house that has belonged to the family for generations. Located in a small English town not far from the coast, it is the same place where her mother, fed up with her husband, took them when they were children. Although it is full of memories, the house seems increasingly foreign to them, and its maintenance more expensive, so the brothers consider selling it and getting rid of it forever.
Aware that this could be the last summer they spend together, emotions run high and there is a tense calm that is heightened by the presence of Pilar, the new and imposing wife of one of the brothers, as well as by that of Kasim, the charismatic son of another's ex-boyfriend. An amalgam of memories, interests and personalities is then formed with which the family will have to live for three long, warm weeks if they want to preserve ties that seem weaker every day.
In The Past, Tessa Hadley presents us with a story in which a family's silenced past threatens to explode and become unsustainable. Memory and the present dialogue in a novel of elegant prose and unmistakable British phlegm, in which the reader witnesses the sharing of a life that, although in theory they shared, each of the four brothers perceives in their own way, with their own frustrated expectations and from their present and past singularity.
