Sunstroke and Other Stories - Softcover

Hadley, Tessa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312425996 ISBN 13: 9780312425999

Publisher: Picador, 2007

Synopsis

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 Sunstroke and Other 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.

About this title

About the Author:

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 novel The Master Bedroom was published by Henry Holt.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ten elegant stories from Welsh author Hadley (Everything Will Be All Right) explore the various stages of women's experience. The title story, set at a seaside cottage in Wales and told in an austerely omniscient voice, tracks two attractive early-30ish mothers, one married, the other partnered, who each begin a flirtation with a visiting doctor friend. In Mother's Son, the other woman in an adulterous affair that ended 20 years before finds herself ruefully counseling her grown son—the product of the affair—on dealing with his romantic troubles. Each of these beautifully crafted tales (some set in the 1970s) encapsulates a tender, transformative moment for these real characters, such as the provincial vicar's daughter in Buckets of Blood sent up to visit her older sister in Cambridge for the week who finds, to her horror and disappointment, her sister reeling from a miscarriage that puts her, like their worn-out mother, among the ranks of women submerged and knowing amid their biology. In another tale, a man tracks down the now matronly woman who flirted with him when he was a blushing 13-year-old on a seaside holiday with his family 25 years before. Hadley's eerie, knowing portrayals speak to the heart as much as the mind.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0312425996
• ISBN 13: 9780312425999
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192