Late in the Day - Hardcover

Hadley, Tessa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1787331113 ISBN 13: 9781787331112

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2019

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**

Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead.

In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach was the sanest and kindest of them all, the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

Late in the Day explores the tangled webs at the centre of our most intimate relationships, to expose how beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again shows that she has ‘become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them.’ (Anthony Quinn Guardian)

Review:

"With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive... her quietly elegant style and muted wit are triumphs... the everyday tragedies and betrayals of domestic life [are] rendered by Hadley’s prose into something extraordinary... The tone of Late in the Day is perhaps Hadley’s most delicate accomplishment." (Ron Charles Washington Post)

"Tessa Hadley is one of your finest writers... [she] approaches her subjects with the sort of attention to detail that a Dutch Golden Age master might bring to a jug and a bowl of fruit... Hadley is the real deal." (Alex O'Connell The Times)

"You know you are in safe hands with Tessa Hadley who, on a sheer sentence-by-sentence level, delivers more enjoyment than almost any other living writer... you'll be hanging on to every word." (Daily Mail *The Best Holiday Reading*)

"There may be no historical newness to women’s disenchantment with male authority, but it feels new to write about it with this much raw honesty... It’s to her great credit that Hadley manages to be old-fashioned and modernist and brilliantly postmodern all at once... Unlocking age-old mysteries in ways both revelatory and inevitable. We’ve seen this before, and we’ve never seen this before, and it’s spectacular." (Rebecca Makkai New York Times)

"Like all Hadley’s novels, Late in the Day enthrals. " (Tatler)

"Tessa Hadley picks apart the stitches of marriage, friendship and self with an almost forensic curiosity [in Late in the Day], cementing her place as one of Britain's finest writers of contemporary fiction." (Thea Lenarduzzi Vogue)

"Hadley examines profound areas of life – friendship, marriage, parenthood, grief, love – with a delightful precision, hitting different nails on the head over and over again... Her novel is full of these piercing little moments of revelation... [because of] the crispness of Hadley’s narrative, and the wisdom of her observations: you trust her... [Late in the Day has] a touch of genius." (Craig Brown Mail on Sunday)

"A real triumph... a very fine novel." (Radio 4, Saturday Review)

"[Hadley] is a gifted anatomist of human relationships... Her particular genius lies in the elegance and precision with which she captures the fleeting emotion, the passing, indefinable perception or tiny epiphany." (Katherine Powers Wall Street Journal)

"Hadley’s fiction ― both long and short ― has, with a delicious, detached clarity, observed the shape of relationships: their unconventionality, their transgressions. She is a superb stylist, with none of the pretensions that have latterly been attached to such a term: dispassionate, yet voluptuous in her prose." (Catherine Taylor Financial Times)

About the Author:

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, and three short-story collections, most recently Bad Dreams. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker. In 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize; in 2018 she was awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for Bad Dreams.

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1787331113
• ISBN 13: 9781787331112
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288