Tessa Hadley books

Anthologies

Collections

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

Tessa Hadley published her first novel in 2002, but she had been writing long before that, and her debut arrived with the assurance of someone who had spent years carefully working out what she wanted fiction to do. She writes about ordinary life, about marriages under strain, family tensions, the shifting loyalties of friendship, and the way memory and desire reshape the past, but her prose makes all of it feel newly observed. The comparison to Alice Munro is one she has earned.

Her body of work is wide. Eight novels, four story collections, a volume of shorter individual pieces, and the academic study Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (1998), which grew out of her PhD and remains a serious work of criticism. She has also appeared in anthologies including Granta and the London Review of Books, and her contributions to The New Yorker have made her one of the most visible British short story writers in America.

The novels span two decades and are worth reading in publication order simply to trace how her concerns develop, though each stands alone. Readers who like their literary fiction attentive to class, gender, and the textures of everyday British life, written with real formal control, will find Hadley’s work consistently rewarding.