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Everything Will Be All Right
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...
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...
432 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2002
42 people are currently reading
676 people want to read
About the author
Tessa Hadley
64 books968 followersTessa Hadley is the author of Sunstroke and Other Stories, and the novels The Past, Late in the Day and Clever Girl. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
July 16, 2025
So, Jennifer W in Gotham and Mark P in Oz were getting all up in my business, wanting me to read Tessa Hadley. They both know that I don’t like my literature to exceed the year 2000, but they were so nudgy and all.
This novel of Ms. Hadley’s was published in 2003, so, close enough to my cut-off to qualify, and Mark P was willing to do a buddy read with me, so here we are, with my first (and certainly not my last) Tessa Hadley read.
The title, EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT, is uninspired. It means nothing, and there wasn’t one point in the story where that descriptor made sense to me. They might as well have titled it: A BOOK YOU MIGHT LIKE. Also, I had two different versions with two different covers, and they were both as ugly as sin. Hey, Tessa Hadley’s publisher: give this writer the covers she deserves! And, how about promoting her more effectively? (And how about better titles, while we’re bitching about things??)
I had no idea Ms. Hadley was British (I would have read her sooner), and I had no idea she was a peer of one of my all-time favorite writers, Greek-American author, Jeffrey Eugenides.
Both Mr. Eugenides and Ms. Hadley are gifted in deftly conducting the flow of a story through the macro and the micro.
What I mean by that: they both start the show with a big boom of music, then, like gifted conductors, they let you see all of the little subtle parts that make the magic. Like, who realized there were flutes playing softly in there while the bigger instruments banged about?
If I were asked to describe this novel by using just one sentence from the story itself, I’d use this one:
A kind of rage flared up in her at her mother and her aunt, that they were so unknowing, so helpless themselves. . .
This is what this story is about: how four generations of women navigate life, knowing, early on, that not one of them who has walked the walk before them has done a bang-up job of it all, either.
I was captivated by all of the women, but, for me, it was Joyce’s story that completely inhabited my mind. I would have discussed Joyce in detail with my reading partner, Mark, but he was roaring around Adelaide (wherever the hell that is) apparently reading the book from the back of some sort of motorcycle whose details I should know by now, but I’m disinterested in everything with an engine.
Dust gets in your eyes.
So, here we are. I’m Tessa Hadley’s newest fan. Glad to meet you, lady (ugly covers and all).
Ms. Hadley’s style seems so casual, like she’s just scribbling a little something something on the back of a notepad, in pencil, or maybe she’s telling you the story of someone’s failed marriage, over a good cup of coffee.
But, none of this is casual. Writing like this is never casual.
This novel of Ms. Hadley’s was published in 2003, so, close enough to my cut-off to qualify, and Mark P was willing to do a buddy read with me, so here we are, with my first (and certainly not my last) Tessa Hadley read.
The title, EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT, is uninspired. It means nothing, and there wasn’t one point in the story where that descriptor made sense to me. They might as well have titled it: A BOOK YOU MIGHT LIKE. Also, I had two different versions with two different covers, and they were both as ugly as sin. Hey, Tessa Hadley’s publisher: give this writer the covers she deserves! And, how about promoting her more effectively? (And how about better titles, while we’re bitching about things??)
I had no idea Ms. Hadley was British (I would have read her sooner), and I had no idea she was a peer of one of my all-time favorite writers, Greek-American author, Jeffrey Eugenides.
Both Mr. Eugenides and Ms. Hadley are gifted in deftly conducting the flow of a story through the macro and the micro.
What I mean by that: they both start the show with a big boom of music, then, like gifted conductors, they let you see all of the little subtle parts that make the magic. Like, who realized there were flutes playing softly in there while the bigger instruments banged about?
If I were asked to describe this novel by using just one sentence from the story itself, I’d use this one:
A kind of rage flared up in her at her mother and her aunt, that they were so unknowing, so helpless themselves. . .
This is what this story is about: how four generations of women navigate life, knowing, early on, that not one of them who has walked the walk before them has done a bang-up job of it all, either.
I was captivated by all of the women, but, for me, it was Joyce’s story that completely inhabited my mind. I would have discussed Joyce in detail with my reading partner, Mark, but he was roaring around Adelaide (wherever the hell that is) apparently reading the book from the back of some sort of motorcycle whose details I should know by now, but I’m disinterested in everything with an engine.
Dust gets in your eyes.
So, here we are. I’m Tessa Hadley’s newest fan. Glad to meet you, lady (ugly covers and all).
Ms. Hadley’s style seems so casual, like she’s just scribbling a little something something on the back of a notepad, in pencil, or maybe she’s telling you the story of someone’s failed marriage, over a good cup of coffee.
But, none of this is casual. Writing like this is never casual.
January 14, 2020
My first five-star book of 2020. The novel is the story of three generations of English women from just after WW2, to about the present day. it's their ordinary lives, loves, work, and children. Beautiful writing, wonderful characters.
June 28, 2018
It's hard to explain why this novel kept me so absorbed. There's no plot as such, and not all that much happens, other than normal life events seen through three generations of women. But Tessa Hadley's skill is in taking you so thoroughly into the heads of her characters that you become them. Their experiences touch you as if you were living them. I found this particularly the case with Zoe, no doubt because she is the same generation as me. I recognised not just myself in her, but people I know. Zoe at school:
Zoe does make a close friend, Fiona, but inevitably they drift apart as Zoe moves towards academia; much of the rest of the novel concerns her struggle to continue her career and avoid slipping into what she perceives as her mother's dull domesticity after she has a child against the wishes of her partner. Somehow, all this is fascinating, and despite what it sounds like it's a very far cry from chick lit! Deeply intelligent and reflective.
... it could not be endurable, surely something would give way. But of course it was endurable, it was only school and not real torture, and at last the clock would deliver up hometime and the walk to the bus ... Here at last was repose, in the gap before the driver started up the engine and the conductor came selling tickets; she sank into herself, dreaming, alone, hugging her briefcase on her knees, turning her head away if girls in green uniform got on.
[...]
She wasn't much liked by the teachers or by many of the girls; she could see herself that there was something unattractive in how she cherished her apartness, unresponsive in class, refusing to be charmed when the teachers were funny and courted them, sceptical of the togetherness of the gangs of girls.
Zoe does make a close friend, Fiona, but inevitably they drift apart as Zoe moves towards academia; much of the rest of the novel concerns her struggle to continue her career and avoid slipping into what she perceives as her mother's dull domesticity after she has a child against the wishes of her partner. Somehow, all this is fascinating, and despite what it sounds like it's a very far cry from chick lit! Deeply intelligent and reflective.
October 8, 2007
Tessa Hadley's amazing. This is the second novel I've read by her (Accidents in the Home's the other) and I'm looking forward to reading her two new books. She's without a doubt one of the very best contemporary writers. Her characters are real and memorable and she makes them this way quickly, with lovely sentences and details. I thought the structure of the book was great. It opened with a contemporary scene, introducing us to four generations of women that it then moved back in time to show us, for the most part, in the childbearing years of their lives. Many of the characters are artists or academics, and she made them realistic, not cartoons. The way she shifted point of view throughout is wonderful: never disorienting, never disruptive. I can't say enough good things.
May 6, 2013
Of all the Tessa Hadley books I've just read (3, started by a story in the New Yorker recently) This was the best. The plot sounds tired, a look at 4 generations of women in in one british family, but it is anything but. It is absolutely fascinating to see how the culture of each generation affects them, and how they change and age/come of age.
October 22, 2021
I am such an admirer of Tessa Hadley’s recent novels (The Past and the brilliant Late in the Day) that I wanted to dip into her backlist, so tried this, one of her earliest novels. The events span 50 years and 4 generations of the women in one family, from the Second World War to the present day (well, until 2003, the date of publication). Lil was widowed when her husband was killed at Dunkirk, so she and her children move in with her better-off sister Vera. Lil’s 13-year-old daughter, Joyce, observes the adult sisters closely: Vera has a flagrantly adulterous husband (the appropriately named Dick) so devotes herself to teaching and the life of the mind, while the simple Lil is worn out by the drudgery of keeping house. Joyce determines to make better choices for herself and ends up going to art school, where she falls for one of her (adulterous) instructors, ends up marrying him and having her own children, including Zoe, who goes on to grow up, marry the insufferable Simon, and have Pearl, who’s a shrill, angry (insufferable) teenager. There’s a real sense of flow and the passage of time, admirably achieved in a relatively compact novel, and the lives depicted show the expansion of opportunities for women over the decades. But the dominant fact of women’s existence seems to be motherhood, for good or ill. (I feel for the academic Zoe, with screechy witch of a daughter, Pearl, though one assumes the teenager will probably grow out of it.) The men do not come off well here at all: there’s not a decent bloke in the lot. Told with Hadley’s sharply observant eye for ordinary lives, though it’s clear she’s very much matured as a writer over the ensuing decades.
March 1, 2019
I love Tessa Hadley's writing. She is young, willing to push against the traditional fictional fences, and gets how people talk and interact with each other today. This is an early novel, one I'd never heard of; I couldn't even find it when I googled Hadley's novels. I just happened to find it while browsing in my local library.
Everything Will Be All Right is a wonderful story of the changing course of marriage and family dynamics from post war England in the 1950s through to the early 2000's. Fifty years of changing politics, culture, climate, fashion and gender roles. A dominant theme is the role of adults in protecting or failing to protect their young and how this role or desire or obsession can affect parents and their children in enormous, not always propitiously. It doesn't feel as strange and nuanced as Hadley's later novels, but I love the characters, the way they react to the fact that the world is filled with horror, excitement, and danger. That much danger is, in fact, terribly exciting.
Everything Will Be All Right is a wonderful story of the changing course of marriage and family dynamics from post war England in the 1950s through to the early 2000's. Fifty years of changing politics, culture, climate, fashion and gender roles. A dominant theme is the role of adults in protecting or failing to protect their young and how this role or desire or obsession can affect parents and their children in enormous, not always propitiously. It doesn't feel as strange and nuanced as Hadley's later novels, but I love the characters, the way they react to the fact that the world is filled with horror, excitement, and danger. That much danger is, in fact, terribly exciting.
August 7, 2010
I wanted to hug this book’s face off. If you’re not familiar with Sara-praise, that’s the kind of swooning compliment I reserve for Noel Gallagher and The West Wing. As in, I find very few faults in what I see, and the faults I do find, I brush off with the affection of an indulgent spouse. Talent moves me, particularly good writing.
So you’re saying you liked the book, Sara? Yes, I loved the book.
Intense longing, bedtime smells, English accents and complicated artists? Man, it’s like someone created a book with me in mind, if only to give me a break from thinking about musicians.
(Full review can be found on Glorified Love Letters.)
So you’re saying you liked the book, Sara? Yes, I loved the book.
Intense longing, bedtime smells, English accents and complicated artists? Man, it’s like someone created a book with me in mind, if only to give me a break from thinking about musicians.
(Full review can be found on Glorified Love Letters.)
February 10, 2017
I love Hadley's novels. this one takes a family through several generations and shows how people grow and change. the characters are vibrant and believable.
August 24, 2019
I love this author. Her writing is excellent. The characters are perfectly described. Life over the years. 👍
January 19, 2019
Very enjoyable read about mothers and daughters -- a topic that I usually disdain in a novel. Ron I forget his last name, the critic for the Washington Post just favorably reviewed Hadley's latest novel and I found this, her first I believe, at the library. According to Ron, when she failed in her early life to get a book published, she went back to school and got a graduate degree focused on Henry James. He believes that immeasurably influenced her writing, in a great way. Without out trying to sound too elitist, I totally agree that there is a noticeable James' influence here. I didn't warm up to James until I was in my 40's -- and he's now one my big favorites. Hadley's focus on everyday things, which in reality are everything, reminded me of James.
So, this story of several generations of women was both compelling, and felt real. It was in no way a soap opera nor maudlin - things that usually put me off "womens" stories. Men also are, obviously, central to the tale, and are treated as full human beings - just as human as the women. Not just background. The title says it all, getting old may suck, but all those amazingly important life altering problems of the young -- its all going to be OK.
So, this story of several generations of women was both compelling, and felt real. It was in no way a soap opera nor maudlin - things that usually put me off "womens" stories. Men also are, obviously, central to the tale, and are treated as full human beings - just as human as the women. Not just background. The title says it all, getting old may suck, but all those amazingly important life altering problems of the young -- its all going to be OK.
October 29, 2022
A rich and very satisfying meandering between four generations of women and how they attempt to discover how to live their lives. Superbly insightful and vivid and thoroughly enjoyable.
A second read, without any recollection of the first and, on reading the above, some slight astonishment at my original enthusiasm. This time I found the academic discussions somewhat alien (a reflection on my lack thereof, obviously) and felt somewhat removed, though no doubt Tessa Hadley is superb at building characters of this time and type.
A second read, without any recollection of the first and, on reading the above, some slight astonishment at my original enthusiasm. This time I found the academic discussions somewhat alien (a reflection on my lack thereof, obviously) and felt somewhat removed, though no doubt Tessa Hadley is superb at building characters of this time and type.
December 31, 2008
Wonderful--Hadley sketches the four generations of this family in such lush detail. The women are all so realistically drawn--Zoe in particular reminds me of people I knew from school, who struggled when it came time to leave the world of the intelligentsia behind for family life and child-rearing.
May 16, 2017
I agree with the Times reviewer: strangely compelling despite almost total lack of a plot. I would have liked to follow each main character for longer, but layering their stories added something, too. I like that Hadley concentrates not on courtship itself but on the early years of a significant relationship instead-- a new marriage, e.g. It's very interesting, and much less common to read about.
May 17, 2022
This book is so cosy, by which I don't mean twee but instead intimate. I really enjoyed spending time with twenty-something Zoe particularly (but Simon, what a dick). If you like Maggie O'Farrell you'd probably be into Tessa Hadley too.
May 30, 2022
Overlong family saga - the early chapters about Vera and Lil are dull, but it improves as the focus turns to later generations. I especially enjoyed the underlying comedy in the chapter on the teenage Pearl moving in with her high-minded father.
April 28, 2012
If everything hurts, always remember that everything will be alright! ;)
July 22, 2015
Started good but then quickly became dull.
March 12, 2017
Remarkably well written and complex, with characters that live and breathe. An enjoyable story, although at times it rambled so widely it seemed a bit off kilter. She's a terrific writer.
May 10, 2019
Still totally in love with the wonderful Tessa Hadley; I think it's because her books are just slices of the characters' lives, they feel so real, I could read their whole lives...
June 6, 2019
This book is definitely alright.
A good read about a family where the generations so represent their times. Very evocative of respective eras and way of life.
A good read about a family where the generations so represent their times. Very evocative of respective eras and way of life.
August 1, 2021
A story about 4 generations of women, and what being a women, wife and mother means to each of them.
Joyce and her sister Ann, brother Martin, and their mother Lil go to live with Lil’s sister Vera, her husband Dick and their children Peter and Kay. Vera is fiercely clever and independent and a teacher at the local grant maintained school. Lil stays at home and keeps house and looks after the children. Early on we see the choice women have to make between career and looking after the home, and in Vera’s case in remaining married. The story covers Joyce growing up, making friends and rebelliously going to Art College where she meets her husband, her tutor Ray. Joyce chooses the domestic route and throughout her life makes and redecorates houses, always with a studio for her husband. She has a daughter Zoe, another rebel and son Daniel. Joyce’s marriage survives in-spite of Ray’s lack of fidelity. Zoe gives up her scholarship at the private school to go to the local comp, her independent intelligence taking her to Cambridge where she meets and falls in love with Simon. Accidentally on purpose, they have a daughter Pearl and very soon Zoe leaves Simon who makes no effort to adapt his life to the child he did not want. Zoe manages a successful career and bringing up a daughter. Now it is the daughter who lives a self centred, hedonistic life. Fed up with clearing up after another party Zoe sends Pearl to live with Simon, who finds he cannot focus on his work - instead he devotes his life to educating Pearl.
The men in the story are resolutely selfish and unfaithful, and the twist at the end was nicely done. The women are left with difficult choices. As with many Tessa Hadley novels there is one character who is clever and returns to her PhD and academia, and another who finds herself through her creativity.
One of the best Tess Hadley books, the characters were unique and believable. The arc of the story through the generations drew me along. There were some lovely descriptive passages - descriptions of school life, settings in Bristol and Cambridge, the domestic stress, toil, and over whelming emotions of young motherhood and the wreck one teenager can cause to a flat.
Joyce and her sister Ann, brother Martin, and their mother Lil go to live with Lil’s sister Vera, her husband Dick and their children Peter and Kay. Vera is fiercely clever and independent and a teacher at the local grant maintained school. Lil stays at home and keeps house and looks after the children. Early on we see the choice women have to make between career and looking after the home, and in Vera’s case in remaining married. The story covers Joyce growing up, making friends and rebelliously going to Art College where she meets her husband, her tutor Ray. Joyce chooses the domestic route and throughout her life makes and redecorates houses, always with a studio for her husband. She has a daughter Zoe, another rebel and son Daniel. Joyce’s marriage survives in-spite of Ray’s lack of fidelity. Zoe gives up her scholarship at the private school to go to the local comp, her independent intelligence taking her to Cambridge where she meets and falls in love with Simon. Accidentally on purpose, they have a daughter Pearl and very soon Zoe leaves Simon who makes no effort to adapt his life to the child he did not want. Zoe manages a successful career and bringing up a daughter. Now it is the daughter who lives a self centred, hedonistic life. Fed up with clearing up after another party Zoe sends Pearl to live with Simon, who finds he cannot focus on his work - instead he devotes his life to educating Pearl.
The men in the story are resolutely selfish and unfaithful, and the twist at the end was nicely done. The women are left with difficult choices. As with many Tessa Hadley novels there is one character who is clever and returns to her PhD and academia, and another who finds herself through her creativity.
One of the best Tess Hadley books, the characters were unique and believable. The arc of the story through the generations drew me along. There were some lovely descriptive passages - descriptions of school life, settings in Bristol and Cambridge, the domestic stress, toil, and over whelming emotions of young motherhood and the wreck one teenager can cause to a flat.
December 3, 2023
Tessa Hadley's second book, quietly a 9/11 novel disguised as intergenerational light drama about women's changing lives after WWII, isn't Late in the Day, and that's about the worst thing I can say about it. Amazing to see her do, with extreme simplicity, things that others have tried and utterly failed at (The Female Persuasion), or done a bit obtusely (The Emperor's Children), or even carried off with dazzling aplomb but a lot of virtuosic complexity (Behind the Scenes at the Museum). Hadley's books never read as virtuosic, and yet they are intensely absorbing in their psychological acuity and fluidity, you feel that she's sitting in the moments that interest her and letting them puddle around her and then getting up and moving on only when she's ready. Having come off a yearlong Anita Brookner kick I am ready for psychological realism that is less acid and despairing and I am thinking that reading all the Hadley there is will make a good next project.
September 11, 2022
The title is every parent's go-to reassurance, but four generations of parents and children in this novel prove how hard it is to believe-- or even pretend to believe. From the 1940s on the Stevensons and their descendants struggle to preserve individuality as both child and parent. Joyce, her mother Lil, her Aunt Vera, her daughter Zoe, and granddaughter Pearl all face the challenges of their times as they try to make everything all right.
'They think that because you're female you won't need any further intellectual stimulation after you're married. But take it from me, once you've been awakened to the life of the mind, you can't just smother that life and put it to sleep, however inconvenient it might be for some.'--Aunt Vera p.18
'And it's sometimes a strain, standing on guard, pretending to the woman that everything's going to be all right, everything's nice.' Ray to Joyce p. 139
'He was astonished at how far, far down the soul could drop out of such a makeshift and snatched repose; hauling it up to consciousness again, when guilt roused him after fifteen or twenty minutes, felt like pulling his resisting heart out of a deep well.' Simon p. 282
'-- It'll be all right, he could only say to her. Everything will be all right.
--Don't be stupid, Pearl said crossly. No it won't.' p. 288
'They think that because you're female you won't need any further intellectual stimulation after you're married. But take it from me, once you've been awakened to the life of the mind, you can't just smother that life and put it to sleep, however inconvenient it might be for some.'--Aunt Vera p.18
'And it's sometimes a strain, standing on guard, pretending to the woman that everything's going to be all right, everything's nice.' Ray to Joyce p. 139
'He was astonished at how far, far down the soul could drop out of such a makeshift and snatched repose; hauling it up to consciousness again, when guilt roused him after fifteen or twenty minutes, felt like pulling his resisting heart out of a deep well.' Simon p. 282
'-- It'll be all right, he could only say to her. Everything will be all right.
--Don't be stupid, Pearl said crossly. No it won't.' p. 288
November 10, 2025
”And yet Joyce was also ready for the possibility that it was true. Secretly, she had probably always believed that if only someone ever uncovered her real self it might command love like this, all at one blow: like a vindication from outside of all the innumerable tiny things that made her up and that otherwise only she would ever know.”
Dense and intelligent writing that follows the lives of four generations of women. The plot is their lives, but I found this book hard to take at times while being awed at Hadley’s observations and sentences. I have compassion for the women, felt irritated by their flaws, related to them, pitied them, saw the context of the times and all the men sucked. There’s Vera with slimy Dick’s infidelity — reminiscent of Bojack Horseman’s father, then there’s Joyce who Dick grooms loyalty in, who marries Ray, older than her, whose infidelity spawns image issues/ a preoccupation with her appearance. (their relationship begins with her in college while he is married to another woman). They have Zoe, who has a baby with freak show Simon (whom I hated so much) who mirrors Ray in his arrogance and showboaty intellectualism. The woman take on the brunt of childcare, toiling the endless and hidden work behind house walls and raising the children out of endless love. Pearl Deare the Millennial was Simon’s karma, and I’m glad for it. Life is long, filled with reverberations of past generations flapping of butterfly wings, it is random and tragic and mundane and mundanely sad and it is nice. That’s what this book made me think, but I will not remember the characters for long.
”Perhaps it didn’t matter. Life filled up so quickly with other things, changing during those years at such a rate it seemed as though almost every six months or so you shed one self and stepped into a new one, leaving behind a phase of your personality and your role and your desires as mere discarded skin.”
Dense and intelligent writing that follows the lives of four generations of women. The plot is their lives, but I found this book hard to take at times while being awed at Hadley’s observations and sentences. I have compassion for the women, felt irritated by their flaws, related to them, pitied them, saw the context of the times and all the men sucked. There’s Vera with slimy Dick’s infidelity — reminiscent of Bojack Horseman’s father, then there’s Joyce who Dick grooms loyalty in, who marries Ray, older than her, whose infidelity spawns image issues/ a preoccupation with her appearance. (their relationship begins with her in college while he is married to another woman). They have Zoe, who has a baby with freak show Simon (whom I hated so much) who mirrors Ray in his arrogance and showboaty intellectualism. The woman take on the brunt of childcare, toiling the endless and hidden work behind house walls and raising the children out of endless love. Pearl Deare the Millennial was Simon’s karma, and I’m glad for it. Life is long, filled with reverberations of past generations flapping of butterfly wings, it is random and tragic and mundane and mundanely sad and it is nice. That’s what this book made me think, but I will not remember the characters for long.
”Perhaps it didn’t matter. Life filled up so quickly with other things, changing during those years at such a rate it seemed as though almost every six months or so you shed one self and stepped into a new one, leaving behind a phase of your personality and your role and your desires as mere discarded skin.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 17, 2025
The story is about four generations of women: their struggles, failures and successes; with each new generation feeling sure she can do better than the one before, and finding a bit of humility along the way. In the telling of this story, Tessa Hadley has done it again — how can a novel where not much happens be so absorbing? What I love most is her description of people’s thoughts — so authentic. I guess they call that “interiority.” In most novels, even ones I love, there is invariably a false note somewhere — a character does something that doesn’t make sense , or a description is off — but not in a Tessa Hadley book. There is no gap between what’s on the page and life as it is actually lived. Compassionate but never sweet or saccharine.
May 15, 2018
Man, I don't know. This was like all Tessa Hadley's other novels. Okay, not great. I just didn't find the characters real enough, or the plot particularly interesting.. Which wouldn't matter, I mean, I've read books where not much happens but I can't put them down because the writing is so good, the characters so vivid.. But that's just not the case here. I don't know, I mean, it wasn't a crappy book. It was a solid 3 stars, maybe 3.3. Some parts were more interesting than others, but all together, it was not anything to write home about.
May 31, 2020
While I loved Hadley's earlier book, The London Train, I found this novel lacking. There were several interesting characters, but I found it hard to relate to the novel's main character Zoe, and her love for (?) and relationship with the hard to like, Simon, and their child, Pearl. I'll keep reading Hadley and hope her other novels are more engaging.
February 23, 2025
I generally like Hadley's writing and this book has some profound moments, but I found it mostly meandering and unfocused. She drifts in and out of the lives of numerous characters spanning multiple generations, but I was left feeling I didn't really get to know most of them or see much of a theme or common thread in their stories.
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