Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #322601 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

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

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

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

Customer Reviews

Disappointingly dull
I thoroughly enjoyed Tessa Hadley's "sunstroke" short stories but found this novel very dull, I couldn't muster any interest at all in the characters and at the end was left with the impression that nothing very much had happened. Perhaps I missed something.

my kind of book
I picked this out as it was longlisted for the Orange prize this year and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have never read this author before but was drawn in straight away by the characters and the plot. It is about a woman who gives up an academic life to live with her aging mother back home in Wales. She meets up with a man she used to go to school with which sparks memories of the past.It is at times funny, sad and very moving. My only gripe is the author's style of punctuation which irritated at first.Didn't make it to the short list but well worth a read.

Dull, slow and predictable
The (lack of) punctuation in speech was irritating, but I thought I shouldn't give up straight away on perhaps a minor point. But the characters were dull, flat and uninteresting. I had no empathy with any of them. The plot was predictable, especially the ending. The writing was also heavily laden with adjectives - which just became all too much. Don't know how it got long-listed.