Married Love
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 a new collection
3.6 out of 5 based on 13 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Short Stories |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
240 |
| RRP |
£14.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0224096423 |
| Publisher |
Jonathan Cape |
| |
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 a new collection
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Reviews
The Daily Telegraph
Elena Seymenliyska
"This is a world of architects, teachers and art therapists who have complicated relationships in striking homes filled with beautiful objects. Sometimes disparagingly described as domestic fiction, in Hadley’s hands these sorts of situations and characters have a subtlety and intelligence that transcends the dismissive label. But this is not the messy, prosaic realism of Helen Simpson’s short stories. There is a grand sweep and an emotional charge that brings to mind D H Lawrence."
08/02/2012
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The Times
Matthew Dennison
"Occasionally — very occasionally — a book feels like a gift, something unexpected, exhilarating, life enhancing. Tessa Hadley’s second collection of short stories is such a book. Its stories embrace by turns the middle-class artiness of a Penelope Lively novel and the pert stereotypes of comedy sketches by Victoria Wood."
07/01/2012
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The Guardian
Alfred Hickling
"Hadley's stories frequently manage to compress a novel's-worth of development into 20-odd pages without seeming rushed or to be merely skimming the surface. The protagonists are thoughtfully developed and minor characters often illuminated with a single, incisive detail: you only need to be told that Pam "always drove with the interior light on; she treated her car like just another room in the house" to have a pretty clear idea who Pam might be. "
29/12/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Rachel Hore
"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."
08/01/2012
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The Observer
Edmund Gordon
"Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibín, among all the working short story writers I'm aware of, are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. With Married Love, Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys. She is not an innovative writer, perhaps, but she excites nevertheless in the freshness and variety of her perceptions."
08/01/2012
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The Scotsman
Lee Randall
"Like a gemologist, Tessa Hadley can spot the treasure hidden inside the grubby, misshapen knot of human experience. Deploying prose as sharp as a diamond chisel, she strikes cleanly and precisely, releasing gems that reflect life in all its dazzling facets. I find myself reading her in a halting fashion, stopping repeatedly to say, “Yes! Exactly that!”"
07/01/2012
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The New Statesman
Olivia Laing
"As in Chekhov, there is a sense, in this deliberate understatement, that one is seeing the world as it is, unadorned and unconcerned; a sense, too, that both these writers could slip bonelessly into any one of that motley collection of passengers and draw from them a succession of stories as beguiling and strange as magicians' scarves."
09/01/2011
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The Literary Review
Thomas Marks
"She’s as sharp as Alan Hollinghurst or Edward St Aubyn on the cruel comedy of English manners, which makes the unswerving compassion of these stories only more exceptional. "
01/02/2012
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The Financial Times
Adrian Turpin
"… quietly mischievous … Hadley is a writer who is “helplessly forever her”, slowly revealing a torrent of emotional wisdom beneath her cool, wry prose."
22/01/2012
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The Spectator
Philip Womack
"Though a couple of the stories don’t quite retain her acuity (‘Journey Home’, for instance, about a plane journey delayed by snow), 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."
07/01/2012
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The Independent
Emma Hagestadt
"Some of the best stories in the book revolve around large family gatherings, where the author leads us masterfully through the emotional spectrum from thwarted toddlers to demanding matriarchs. It's at these boozy lunches and suburban soirées that Hadley takes a long hard look at where old loves might die and new futures begin. This party is well worth attending."
06/01/2012
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The Sunday Times
Helen Davies
"Married Love is an accomplished, confident collection, but rather like a love affair it is best to dip in and out of it."
08/01/2012
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Times Literary Supplement
Terri Apter
"The varied stories here all deal with love in some form; but, reduced to half its normal size, love loses its place as the engine of fiction’s plots. People who gravitate towards each other as a couple have their route reconfigured by the pull of a mutual friend or chance encounter. While romance is buffeted and bitten by other conversations and bonds, the characters are enmeshed in transient sensation such as the smells of furniture polish, scalded dish rags and boiling cabbage."
16/03/2012
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