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Summary and Reviews of After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

After the Funeral and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • Jul 11, 2023, 240 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jul 2024, 240 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships.

In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie's own age—everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley's celebrated body of work, After the Funeral and Other Stories bears out Claire Messud's observation that "Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift of making small canvases inexhaustibly new...Compassionate and luminous, Hadley sees them all—or should I say, she sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys."

After the Funeral

After the funeral, the two little girls, aged nine and seven, accompanied their grief-stricken mother home. Naturally they were grief-stricken also; but then again, they hadn't known their father very well, and hadn't enormously liked him. He was an airline pilot, and they'd preferred it when he was away working; being alert little girls, they'd picked up intimations that he preferred it too. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when air travel was still supposed to be glamorous. Philip Lyons had flown 747s across the Atlantic for BOAC, until he died of a heart attack—luckily not while he was in the air but on the ground, prosaically eating breakfast in a New York hotel room. The airline had flown him home free of charge.

All the girls' concentration was on their mother, Marlene, who couldn't cope. Throughout the funeral service she didn't even cry; she was numb, huddled in her black Persian-lamb coat, petite and soft and pretty in dark glasses, with muzzy ...

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Tessa Hadley has made a name for herself with a beautifully subtle style and deep insights into what makes relationships strain and sometimes break. Her work is unshowy yet quietly brilliant...continued

Full Review (684 words)

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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).

Media Reviews

Minneapolis Star Tribune
The work of a singular talent ... These are captivating stories, rich in character and fine-grained detail ... Hadley entertains while offering shrewd, subtle insights into how we tick and the ties that bind us.

Washington Post
Another showcase for Hadley's virtuosity ... After the Funeral is a revelation for aficionados of the form, as vibrant and knowing as the best of Hadley's celebrated career.

Financial Times (UK)
Mirroring the experience of a short summer swim, the stories in Tessa Hadley's new collection After the Funeral consistently pull you in from the first sentence, immerse you agreeably and effortlessly, and then set you, sometimes a bit abruptly, down on the bank...The capacity to make readers care from the off about what happens to these imaginary people next is an unquantifiable, indefinable talent that cannot be taught. You've got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it.

The Guardian (UK)
Her unpicking of character is focused, intense and yet always, somehow, in parallel, kind. What it does best is produce in the reader exactly what she offers her characters, for a sickening moment or two, in each story: a vast, difficult, unruly elation.

The Observer (UK)
As one of our finest novelists, she has, throughout her writing life, been a short story supremo ... It is hard to imagine stories more skillfully paced and polished than these.

The Sunday Times (UK)
[Hadley has] made a compelling career from her close observation of the frictive disconnections that roil beneath the surface of what looks polite and well-behaved ... The strongest stories resonate, offering glimpses of the hidden selves we all conceal.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The mastery she has honed over a decades-long career makes Hadley's gaze as sharp as her empathy is expansive; each tale feels as satisfying as a full-length novel despite—or perhaps because of—the ambiguous endings. A pleasure to read, with characters and themes that linger long after the final page.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
[Hadley] proves herself a magician of short fiction with this wonderful collection featuring characters whose epiphanies shift their conception of their lives...Readers will marvel over these twisty and masterly tales.

Reader Reviews

Radhika Krishnan N R

Very. Good meaningful book
Absorbing and thoroughly readable fourth collection, managed with a quiet dexterity the emotional situations that promote this kind of undoing.
ABHIRAG PM

Tessa Hadley's "After the Funeral and Other Stories" is a literary triumph that invites readers into a world of exquisite storytelling. With a masterful touch, Hadley crafts a collection of stories that resonate with emotional depth and nuanced ...   Read More
Shivani shakya

"After the Funeral and Other Stories" by Tessa Hadley is a collection of short stories that delves into the intricacies of human relationships and emotions. Hadley's writing is elegant and perceptive, drawing readers into the lives of her characters ...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



Literary Late Bloomers and Prizes Honoring Their Achievement

Bonnie Garmus Tessa Hadley, author of After the Funeral and Other Stories, did not have a book published until age 46. In interviews, she has been frank about the fact that her first four or five novels, written in her twenties and long since discarded, didn't measure up. "I am so glad I didn't publish a debut novel at 25, because [the books] were dead. I would have loved it at the time, but they were terrible," she said in 2022. She told the Los Angeles Review of Books, "I was a slow developer and … didn't have a strong, forceful sense of who I was and what my authority was and what I had to say. That took a long time to grow, and I came into it late, and now I don't regret that. I'm almost glad that I had that 20 years of trying and failing &...

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Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

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