The Master Bedroom - Hardcover

Hadley, Tessa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224078542 ISBN 13: 9780224078542

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2007

Synopsis

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate's forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother in Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it's because she's bored and hasn't got anything else to do, but she can't stop. David is married, rational, dependable: the last type to want an affair.

David's marriage isn't as solid as it looks, though. His wife Suzie has moved out of their bedroom, she avoids talking to David or spending time at home with him and their children, she has made new friends who smoke dope and believe in fortune telling. David takes refuge in Firenze, where he can
talk to Kate about music.

David's seventeen-year-old son Jamie is also drawn to the old house full of books and history. He is more like Kate than his father is, bookish and clever: he wants to find out all about life from her. He turns up one night at Firenze, drunk and desperate.

Tessa Hadley's intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, lovers and friends; the past casts its long shadows in the present; men and women who were once confident they knew themselves, learn to attend to the changes unfolding inside them.

About this title

Review:

'...a strong writer when it comes to feminine identity' -- TLS

'An intricate, compelling story told with great insight'. -- Woman & Home

'Compelling and thought-provoking'
-- Red

`Tessa Hadley is a lovely, subtly teasing writer'. -- The New York Times

'Beautifully crafted novel, utterly addictive.'
-- Big Issue Cymru

'Tessa Hadley is...a prose stylist of quite outstanding talent
with a gift for psychological acuity and an ability to encapsulate the
human condition.'
-- Guardian Guardian

`Closely observed, beautifully written, generous, funny and true, Hadley's fiction is the real thing.'
-- Sunday Times

`Hadley has an eye for arresting images, and the faculty with language to evoke them.' -- Claire Kilroy, Irish Times

`Hadley is skilled at presenting her characters in facets, building up impressions through confusing contradictions, in the manner of Dostoevsky.'
-- Ingrid Wassenaar, Daily Telegraph

`Hadley's writing is fluent and tightly controlled, her closing sentences like perfect cadences.' -- George Rosie, Sunday Herald

Book Description:

A marvellous third novel by a writer described by the Guardian as a 'rare and startling gem'.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0224078542
• ISBN 13: 9780224078542
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320