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Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives - an ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.
Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley's moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.
Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama - violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley's observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.
"Starred Review. [T]his carefully wrought novel transcends mere character study, offering up Stella's story as a portrait of how accidents and happenstance can cohere into a life." - Publishers Weekly
"Hadley displays the keen insight and masterful portrayal of the domestic life for which she has become known." - Booklist
"Hadley is a fine, insightful writer, but this memoir of a restless, bookish woman coping with a sequence of variable male figures while playing the hand life has dealt her lacks momentum." - Kirkus
"Quietly brilliant…Hadley has always been adept at drawing out the unrecognisable from the everyday…Domestic fiction is often disparaged as less than serious, but Hadley demonstrates admirably that the genre can carry weight." - Sunday Times (UK)
"Lives which are unsophisticated yet experienced intensely, and gorgeously erudite prose are the distinguishing features of Tessa Hadley's writing." - Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Like Munro, Hadley is a writer both exact and lyrical, and there are many pleasures to be found along the way, particularly her sensual descriptions of nature, adolescence, and maternity." - The Guardian (UK)
"Compelling…For all Stella's spikiness and grittiness, there is a sensuousness to Hadley's writing which revels in richly prolix descriptions of sights and states of mind." - The Times (UK)
"Tessa Hadley is a clever writer who likes to play with form. Like Amish quilts, her novels are made up of homespun, domestic material, delicately worked over. Then you step back and see the bold structural decisions behind their composition" - New Statesman (UK)
"Clever Girl is a remarkable novel by one of this country's finest, if most unassuming talents." - Literary Review (UK)
"Hadley writes as a masterly illustrator might draw." - The Observer (UK)
This information about Clever Girl was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Mark Vessey
Tessa Hadley is the author of three previous collections of stories and eight novels. She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and has been a finalist for the Story Prize. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She lives in Cardiff, Wales.
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