Clever Girl: A Novel
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Like Alice Munro and Colm TÃŗibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary livesâan ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.
Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadleyâs moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.
Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in dramaâviolent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadleyâs observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.
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Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, as well as three short story collections, most recently Bad Dreams and Other Stories, which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.
