SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES - Softcover

Tessa Hadley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224078216 ISBN 13: 9780224078214

Publisher: JONATHAN CAPE, 2007

Synopsis

Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach. Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.

About this title

About the Author:

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl and The Past, and two collections of stories, Sunstroke and Married Love. The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016. She lives in London and is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker and other magazines.

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.
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About this edition

• Publisher: JONATHAN CAPE
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0224078216
• ISBN 13: 9780224078214
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160