After the Funeral

By: Tessa Hadley

Narrated by: Abigail Thaw

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the incomparable Tessa Hadley, a masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships.

In each of the twelve stories in After the Funeral, small events have huge consequences. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie's own age - everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

As psychologically astute as they are emotionally dense, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley's celebrated body of work, After the Funeral bears out Claire Messud's observation that 'Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift of making small canvases inexhaustibly new.... Compassionate and luminous, Hadley sees them all - or should I say, she sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys'.

©2023 Tessa Hadley (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

Tessa Hadley is my inspiration, my literary thrill, and my solace all at once. She is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph (Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers)

Few writers since Elizabeth Bowen seem as able to slip so effortlessly between forms, and few have such precision and sheer command - on a tonal and emotional level, at the level of each sentence, and of the short story form. Tessa Hadley's stories are written with a captivating ease. As one of her own characters says of Madame Bovary, there is a ferocious pure aim to Hadley's words that goes right to the heart - of each story, and of this reader. She is truly a great writer and this is a stunning collection (Lucy Caldwell, author of Intimacies)

What a peerless writer Tessa Hadley is! I so enjoyed these beguiling, subtle stories, each one suggesting a world that lives long after one's closed the book (Deborah Moggach, author of These Foolish Things)

Unfinished

Some stories are good, but some feels as though there should be more to come.