Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | My Mother’s Wedding | 2016 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
| 2 | Cecilia Awakened | 2018 | Tessa Hadley | N/A |
| 3 | The Party | 2024 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
Hadley’s shorter standalone fiction gives her more room to concentrate a single situation to its breaking point. My Mother’s Wedding (2016) and The Party (2024), both novellas, unfold around the kind of gathering where ordinary social tensions tip over into something harder to ignore. They have the compression of the best short fiction: not much happens on the surface, but a great deal shifts underneath.
Cecilia Awakened (2018), a shorter piece, is less widely available but consistent with her preoccupations. Readers who want to try Hadley’s work without committing to a full novel would find the novellas an ideal place to start, particularly The Party, which is among her most recent and accomplished shorter works.