Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Accidents in the Home | 2002 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
| 2 | Everything Will Be All Right | 2003 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
| 3 | The Master Bedroom | 2007 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
| 4 | The London Train | 2011 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
| 5 | Clever Girl | 2013 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
| 6 | The Past | 2015 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
| 7 | Late in the Day | 2019 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
| 8 | Free Love | 2022 | Tessa Hadley | Buy |
Tessa Hadley’s eight standalone novels cover a long arc of British literary fiction, beginning with Accidents in the Home in 2002 and continuing through Free Love in 2022. They are all concerned, in some way, with the pressures of domestic and private life: the wear of long marriages, the gap between who we imagined we would become and who we are, the way relationships between parents and children carry old grievances and old love in equal measure.
The novels don’t form a series in any narrative sense, but they share a preoccupation and a style. Hadley writes with an attention to surface detail, to gesture and conversation, that gives her characters the density of people you feel you’ve met. The London Train (2011) and The Past (2015) are among her most structurally ambitious; Clever Girl (2013) and Late in the Day (2019) are perhaps the most emotionally direct. Free Love (2022), set in 1970s Bristol, marked a slight shift in period while keeping her usual concerns intact.