I’m the author of the debut novel The Wrong Kind of Woman (Mira/HarperCollins). Publishers Weekly called it “an entrancing debut,” and Bookreporter’s review noted: “It’s a strong, strident message delivered in a valentine of a book ...with enough gentle grit and determination to keep you thinking about Virginia and the Gang of Four long after the last page is read.” I’m a longtime magazine writer, and a graduate of Dartmouth College, Stanford University, and Vermont College of Fine Arts. I live in New Hampshire on an old farm, where I garden in the summer and snowshoe in the winter.
Tessa Hadley’s latest novelFree Love is set in 1967, and it follows forty-year-old Phyllis Fischer through a life-changing year. After a kiss with a twenty-something family friend, Phyllis is moved to leave behind her life as a contented suburban wife and mom, and to enter a very different life in London. Phyllis doesn’t always make the best choices, but she finds her own way twenty years after marrying and having children. Tessa Hadley always writes beautifully layered novels, and Free Love is a compelling look at a family forced to change, as well as a gorgeous evocation of a tumultuous time.
“Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts.”—Hilary Mantel
From the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past comes a compulsive new novel about one woman’s sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London.
1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their…
Elizabeth Strout’s debut novel is a dual coming-of-age novel, at least in my view. Single mother Isabelle and her sixteen-year-old daughter Amy live in the small, gossipy New England mill town of Shirley Falls. It’s the late ‘60s, and Isabelle is determined to raise her daughter right and live a proper life. But Amy falls in love with the wrong guy. As teenage Amy rebels against Isabelle’s strictures, and as Isabelle tries to ferret out what Amy’s been up to, they move through a rough summer, and both are changed as they begin to understand themselves, and one another, differently. As always with Elizabeth Strout, beautiful character studies, a complete and lived-in setting, and a compelling story.
From the Man Booker Prize longlisted author of My Name is Lucy Barton
Isabelle Goodrow has been living in self-imposed exile with her daughter Amy for 15 years. Shamed by her past and her affair with Amy's father she has submerged herself in the routine of her dead-end job and her unrequited love for her boss. But when Amy, frustrated by her quiet and unemotional mother, embarks on an illicit affair with her maths teacher, the disgrace intensifies the shame Isabelle feels about her own past.
Throughout one long, sweltering summer as the events of the small town ebb and…
Sue Miller’s latest novel is partly an exploration of a long marriage, as its title suggests, but it’s also about a woman who finds a very different understanding of herself after her husband dies too soon. Annie and Graham have made a good life in Cambridge, MA, Graham as the owner of a bookstore and Annie as an artist; they’ve been married for thirty years and have a grown daughter, and Graham has a son by his first marriage. After Graham dies suddenly, Annie goes from deep mourning to learning a terrible secret about Graham, and finally to a new sense of her husband, her marriage, and herself. It’s also a layered look at a family, and all its complications.
A New York Times Book of the Year DAILY MAIL 'BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR TO GIFT FOR CHRISTMAS' SUNDAY EXPRESS' S MAGAZINE 'WINTER WARMERS' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 'BEST BOOKS OF 2020' ONLINE
'One of the most emotionally truthful novels I have ever read' DAISY BUCHANAN 'Almost every line glows with even-handed wisdom - a superb novel, beautifully put together' DAILY MAIL 'An invaluably moving book' JULIET NICOLSON 'One to read first for the story and then to re-read at leisure and marvel at how real these people feel' ERIN KELLY 'Penetrating, intelligent, humane, funny too ... Smart and powerfully alive'…
Maria Semple’s comic novel Where’d You Go, Bernadettelooks at wife and mom Bernadette, who’s falling apart: she can’t deal with her hometown, Seattle, the other moms in her orbit, her neighbors, or much of anything, really. Overwhelmed, Bernadette breaks down and disappears, which leaves Bernadette’s middle-school-age daughter, Bee, to figure out where Bernadette has gone, and why. By the end of this novel, Bernadette, who’s taken herself on a very unlikely trip, has gotten herself together in a whole new way. Where’d You Go, Bernadette also makes great use of emails, texts, and other fictional documents, making it a partly epistolary novel.
A misanthropic matriarch leaves her eccentric family in crisis when she mysteriously disappears in this "whip-smart and divinely funny" novel that inspired the movie starring Cate Blanchett (New York Times).
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect; and to 15-year-old Bee, she is her best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette vanishes. It all began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle --…
Carol Shields’ last novel, Unless(published after her death) follows forty-something mom Reta Winters: Reta’s three daughters are almost grown, she has decent work translating French writers, and she has a supportive husband. Then oldest daughter Norah disappears, and it turns out Norah is now living on the streets of downtown Toronto, wearing a sign around her neck that reads “goodness,” but not speaking a word. This sounds like a bleak scenario, having one’s daughter reject everything she’s grown up with and refusing to explain. But Unless is a sharp, thoughtful, and even funny novel, one that’s not like any other that I’ve read, and Norah’s disappearance leads Reta to come of age as she questions every aspect of her life.
The dazzling novel from Carol Shields, author of 'The Stone Diaries', winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and 'Larry's Party', winner of the Orange Prize.
All her life, it seems to Reta Winters, she has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness. She has a loving husband, three bright daughters and supportive friends, and is experiencing growing success as a writer and translator. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world, abandoning university, family and loving boyfriend to sit on a street corner, uncommunicative but for a sign around her neck bearing one word, 'Goodness'. The anguish of her loss leads…
At the heart of the novel The Wrong Kind of Woman is Virginia, a woman who finds her way through grief when she helps bring the women’s movement to an all-male college campus. The Wrong Kind of Woman takes place in 1970-1971, with a setting loosely based on Dartmouth College, pre-coeducation, with the background pressures of the Vietnam War, student strikes and radical activism, and the emerging second wave of the women's movement. Told through alternating perspectives, The Wrong Kind of Woman is an engrossing story about finding the strength to forge new paths, woven against the rapid changes of the early ’70s.
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first —and to date only— Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000 scholarship for the winner.
An intimate fictional portrait of Bess Myerson’s early life, Bessie reveals the transformation of the nearly six-foot-tall, self-deprecating yet talented preteen into an exemplar of beauty, a peripheral quality in her world. It is the unfamiliar secular society of pageantry she must choose to escape her…
Just days after the close of World War II, Bess Myerson, the college-educated daughter of poor Russian Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx, is competing in the Miss America pageant. At stake: a $5,000 scholarship. The tension and excitement in Atlantic City's Warner Theatre is palpable, especially for traumatized Jews rooting for one of their own. So begins Bessie.
Drawing on biographical and historical sources, Bessie reimagines the early life of Bess Myerson, who, in 1945 at age twenty-one, remarkably rises to become one of the most famous women in America. This intimate fictional portrait reveals the transformation of the…
