After the Funeral

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the incomparable Tessa Hadley, 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 the twelve stories in After the Funeral, 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. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

As psychologically astute as they are emotionally dense, 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 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.'

©2023 Tessa Hadley (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Consistently pulls you in from the first sentence… 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

    Financial Times

  • One of our finest novelists and a short story supremo… It is hard to imagine stories more skilfully paced and polished than these

    Observer

  • After the Funeral is a brilliant collection. From the virtuosity of Hadley’s technique to the clarity of her moral vision and the warmth of her humour, what she has achieved in After the Funeral is nothing short of masterful. Her stories are surprising, profound, and each feels as full as a world

    Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans

  • Beautifully done… The strongest stories resonate, offering glimpses of the hidden selves we all conceal

    Sunday Times

  • She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare… One of the best fiction writers writing today

    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah

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