The debut novel of a formidable fictional talent.

An improbable coincidence brings Clare back into contact with someone she once had sex with as a teenager; to complicate matters, he is now going out with her best friend, Helly. The encounter could have just been embarrassing, but it shakes up everything in Clare's life. Clare and Helly learned to smoke and shoplift together, and even read an old copy of The Female Eunuch together, squeezed side by side on Helly's bed. Now Clare is married with three small children, bakes her own bread and buys her clothes from the charity shop....

Spanning five decades of extrordinary change in women's lives, this novel explores the complicated relationships of one family. The young ones of each generation are sure that they can correct the mistakes of their parents, and live better than they did. The truth, of course, is more opaque.

A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities. This title includes these stories about family life that are somehow undomesticated.

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate is forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother at Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff.

The day after his mother dies Paul learns that his eldest daughter Pia has gone missing. He sets out from Wales in search of her, and when he eventually finds her, living with her lover in a chaotic flat in King's Cross, he thinks at first he wants to rescue her. But instead he finds himself drawn closer to the hub of London, to the excitements of a life lived in jeopardy, to Pia's fragile new family.

In the opposite direction, Cora is moving back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the constrictions and disappointments of her life...

In this latest collection from Tessa Hadley there are domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies.

One woman's life, from childhood to middle age, by Britain's most acute, perceptive novelist of ordinary lives.
All the qualities that readers praised in The London Train are present in Clever Girl, Tessa Hadley's brilliant new novel. It follows the story of Stella, from her childhood as the daughter of a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The story is full of drama -- violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella's schooldays, two sons by different fathers who aren't around to see the boys grow up -- but as ever...

Four siblings meet up in their grandparents' old house for three long, hot summer weeks. But under the idyllic surface lie shattering tensions. Roland has come with his new wife, and his sisters don't like her. Fran has brought her children, who soon uncover an ugly secret in a ruined cottage in the woods.

Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby. A housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. A young girl accepts a lift in a car with a group of strangers. An old friend brings bad news to a dinner party.

'Unflinching, intelligent and fascinating' Marian KeyesThe lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in this Sunday Times bestselling novelAlex and Christine and Zach and Lydia have been inseparable since their twenties.