Tessa Hadley Books in Order

This work of literary criticism examines how Henry James wrote about sexuality, pleasure, class, and moral expectations. Hadley follows his changing treatment of desire, especially in the later fiction and its complicated love affairs.

Clare Verey has three children, a devoted husband, and a comfortable home, until her best friend arrives with a new lover. As Clare’s desire for a different life grows, the strains in her sprawling, blended family come into view.

Across decades of postwar change, several generations of women try to make lives beyond the limits they inherited. Joyce’s hopes, marriage, and daughter Zoe’s choices reveal how family patterns can persist even when each generation resists them.

These stories find desire, resentment, and mischief beneath the surface of domestic life. A son confesses his betrayal, a student follows an obsession, and family holidays reveal danger where comfort should be.

After leaving London to care for her elderly mother in Wales, academic Kate Flynn reconnects with a married childhood friend. His teenage son is also drawn to her, and Kate’s hunger for change turns a difficult homecoming into a risky entanglement.

Paul travels to London to search for his missing adult daughter, then becomes drawn into a dangerous new life of his own. Moving the other way, Cora returns to Cardiff after leaving her marriage, only to find her husband has vanished.

In these stories, marriages, family loyalties, and private fantasies rub against the disappointments of ordinary life. A young woman’s startling engagement opens the title story, while other characters seek refuge in places that cannot quite save them.

Stella looks back on a life shaped by restless ambition, bad timing, and unexpected attachments. Starting as a bright, dissatisfied girl in suburbia, she reaches for freedom and excitement without seeing what those choices will cost.

This anthology gathers the five shortlisted stories for the 2014 BBC National Short Story Award, including Hadley’s Bad Dreams. Her contribution follows a child whose nighttime fear exposes unspoken tensions in the family home.

Four siblings gather for a long summer at their grandparents’ decaying country house, perhaps for the last time. Children, spouses, and an outsider stir up buried rivalries, new desire, and a family secret with lasting weight.

On the day of a free-spirited mother’s wedding to a much younger man, her daughter watches the celebration tilt into unexpected danger. This short story explores family loyalty, embarrassment, and knowledge that arrives too quickly.

Small choices and half-buried memories open into turning points in this collection. Sisters fight over an inheritance, a housekeeper uncovers an old secret, and a frightened child’s dream reveals tensions already living inside the family home.

When Zachary dies suddenly, his widow Lydia moves in with their closest friends, Alex and Christine. Grief exposes old attractions, jealousies, and bargains as the three survivors discover how little their long friendship has settled.

In 1967, suburban wife and mother Phyllis Fischer is jolted awake by an unexpected kiss from a younger family friend. Her choice to leave the life she knows sends shocks through her family as London changes around them.

A dozen stories follow people facing grief, old resentments, difficult marriages, and sudden changes in family life. Each begins close to everyday experience, then finds the pressure point where a relationship can no longer remain unchanged.

In postwar Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn attend an art students’ party and meet two men who seem thrillingly sophisticated. A later invitation to a grand house draws them into one unsettling night that changes how they see themselves.