Clever Girl (P.S. (Paperback)) - Softcover

Hadley, Tessa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062282883 ISBN 13: 9780062282880

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2015

Synopsis

Clever Girl is an indelible story of one woman's life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain's leading literary lights--Tessa Hadley--the author of the New York Times Notable Books Married Love and The London Train.

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.

About this title

Review:

"Subtle....A story that doesn't overreach, about a character who feels real, told in prose that isn't ornate yet is startlingly exact. The effect is a fine and well-chosen pileup of experiences that gather meaning and power....Stella may not stand out, but Tessa Hadley certainly does."--Meg Wolitzer, New York Times Book Review

"Involving.... Intrigues and engages.... The smooth narrative echoes Hadley's cool and precise prose.... There's plenty of family drama (including murder) but Hadley's strength is in describing what is often left unnoticed."--Financial Times (London)

"Ultimately, this is a beautiful and precisely drawn portrait of an everywoman, both extraordinary and ordinary."--Melanie Cremins, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"One woman's story comes to exemplify a whole era in this marvelous novel. Tessa Hadley writes with a poet's attentiveness to language, and finds the profound and wondrous in the seemingly quietest of lives."--Ron Rash, author of Serena

"With Clever Girl, Tessa Hadley examines the blunt force of young adulthood. She deftly portrays this short stretch of time in which we make many of the most important decisions of our lives, all while driving under the influence of ignorance and inchoate sexuality."--Carol Anshaw, author of Carry the One

"A rich, absorbing novel."--Anne Landsman, Vanity Fair

"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, London

"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, London

"Accomplished, elegant....This novel is the life story of an ordinary, middle-aged woman-Stella. Only that she is not ordinary because Tessa Hadley is writing her into existence and is behind her like a following wind....Hadley writes as a masterly illustrator might draw."--The Observer, London

"Hadley remains so fixed in Stella's viewpoint that whatever this stubborn, lonely, eloquent character has to tell us, we accept....Subtle, intelligent, and realistic storytelling."--Evening Standard, London

Book Description:

One woman’s life, from childhood to middle age, by Britain’s most acute, perceptive novelist of ordinary lives

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0062282883
• ISBN 13: 9780062282880
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288