Sunstroke and Other Stories

A Picador Paperback Original Tessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships. A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close. In Tessa Hadley's stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart. Tessa Hadley's first novel,Accidents in the Home,was longlisted forThe Guardian's First Book Award. Four of the stories in Sunstroke were published inThe New Yorker. Hadley lives in Cardiff, Wales. Her latest novel is Master Bedroom. ANew York TimesNotable Book of the Year A finalist for The Story Prize Tessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships. A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close. In Tessa Hadley's stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart."Acollection of Hadley's miraculous short stories. Deft and resonant, they encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived. Hadley never fails to surprise, but her surprises are understated--not the "aha" fakery of some gimmicky short fiction but the small shift in expectations or results that's deeply felt but doesn't show, like the twitch of a rudder that sets a boat gliding on a new course."--Liesl Schillinger,The New York Times"Wholly satisfying . . .Sunstrokecatches life on the wing and pins it, fiercely struggling, to the page."--The Sunday Times(London)"Masterful . . . Tessa Hadley's skill is in taking the ordinary and twisting it, tearing through the surface of veiled emotions kept at bay by everyday humdrum to reveal the hidden tensions and quiet panic beneath."--The Express on Sunday"Hadley's style is as discreet as good tailoring. She writes with an elegant assurance . . . with a technique so self-effacing that the image is in one's brain long before one can analyze how her words were put there."--The Independent"Absorbing and slyly revelatory."--The Daily Mail"The female protagonist in Hadley's first novel,Accidents in the Home, commits adultery to escape domestic drudgery and a lackluster marriage. In their desperation and plaintiveness about the loss of sexual vigor and the thrill of the tryst, the women in these 11 stories (ten previously published) are more like Philip Roth's men than Madame Bovary. In "Exchanges," an older woman who's an Old Testament miracle away from having another child sleeps with a much younger man. As a result, her friend ponders her own sexual life span and concludes that you're not in your right mind to indulge in that kind of adulterous love. Most of the time, though, Hadley is expert at catching her characters trying to reason their actions. The logic has the air of economics: two mothers feel a sensation of "sensual surplus"; one of them thinks her husband "owes" her the passionate kiss s

Tessa Hadley's first novel, Accidents in the Home, was longlisted for The Guardian's First Book Award. Four of the stories in Sunstroke were published in The New Yorker. Hadley lives in Cardiff, Wales. Her new novel, Master Bedroom, will be published by Henry Holt in August 2007.