Published by Vintage, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£8.99
Author:
Tessa Hadley
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9780099462002
£8.99
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780099462002
Published: 5 Jan 2012
Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way.
For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, and to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation. But her daughter Zoe, growing up, comes to see Joyce as a bourgeois housewife, and when Zoe has a baby of her own, she demands more from motherhood...
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Bewitchingly compelling... Gloriously addictive, delectably enjoyable... the reader is snared and kept captive to the last... Exquisite
- Guardian
Hadley's fiction resembles that of Anne Tyler in aiming to illuminate ordinary life
- Sunday Times
Genuinely exciting
- New Statesman
Seductively written
- Sunday Telegraph
Engrossing-This book is marvellous - a paean to the quiet splendour of life
- Time Out
Witty and warm... An astute and accomplished work
- Daily Mail
This fine, thoughtful novel underlines Tessa Hadley's skill at tackling and reclaiming the saga
- Times Literary Supplement
Tessa Hadley is the author of four highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom and, most recently, The London Train, and a collection of short stories, Sunstroke. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories regularly appear in the New Yorker, Granta and other magazines.
