TESSA HADLEY nominated for international prize

Married Love by Tessa Hadley has been longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Competition 2012.  The shortlist will be announced in early June. 

Married Love, Jonathan Cape, January 12
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. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; her marriage to Edgar, the tiny flat they share, the children that follow. 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 new collection.

On full display in these stories are the qualities Tessa Hadley has been praised for often before: her unflinching examination of family relationships; her humour, warmth and psychological acuity; her powerful and precise prose. In this collection there are domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies - captured and distilled to remarkable effect.

Married Love is a collection to treasure, a masterful new work from one of the most accomplished storytellers of today.

Reviews for Married Love:

“If Hadley writes within a domestic frame, she is also a colourful ironist who may be the most perceptive chronicler since George Eliot...” Guardian

"...this collection shows a writer quietly growing in style, perception and grace. She conveys to the reader that rare ability to see completely into someone else’s head." Spectator

“exquisite treats such as these should be taken one at a time - savoured and ruminated over as separate morsels… Tessa Hadley writes like a dream, the prose precise, but funny, too; her psychology always seems spot on and she draws us completely into the many different worlds we encounter here.” Daily Mail
 
“Vividly drawn… Hadley is prepared to tackle the woollier complexities of her characters' interior lives… Like more distilled versions of her novels – she has written four - these stories are shored up with sentences and paragraphs that demand immediate re-reading for their cleverness and warmth.” Independent
 
“[Hadley’s] prose style is delicate, restrained […]; her narratives chart upheavals of the heart with earnest attention to psychological development… social distinctions are microscopically observed… Hadley is a writer of exceptional intelligence and skill and, for all the apparent conventionality of her vision, hers is a subtly subversive talent… ” Observer
 
“The short stories […] are often like movie clips of lives in transit, their small shifts of focus yielding up flashes of psychological insight… sharp characterisation, subtle observation and humour give well-trodden themes fresh flavour. Hadley excels at the domestic context, at pinpointing the particular quiddity on which an individual character turns; at marking the tiny swings of allegiance in human relationships… While Hadley's intent is too serious for her writing ever to be called comic, her tales, told in light, deft prose, are engagingly lifted by humour…” Independent on Sunday
 
“Domestic relationships are the stuff of these delightfully understated, tightly sprung stories.” Woman & Home
 
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