Free Love

By: Tessa Hadley

Narrated by: Abigail Thaw

As 1960s London comes alive with the new youth revolution, one woman makes a choice that defies all expectations.

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 children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy.

But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the family’s upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them.

With scalpel-sharp insight, Tessa Hadley explores her characters’ inner worlds, laying bare their fears and longings. Daring and sensual, Free Love is an enthralling, irresistible exploration of romantic love, sexual freedom and living out the truest and most meaningful version of our lives.

©2022 Tessa Hadley (P)2022 Random House Canada

Critic reviews

“A beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate.” —Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

“Her novels are masterful domestic dramas that obsess over the mechanics of adultery and illicit passion…. Yet if Hadley is drawn to these moments of intense rupture—and who isn’t?—what makes her exceptional is her writing of their consequences, which are often both more, and less, earth-shattering than they initially seemed…. In Free Love, these domestic embroilments become intermingled with tides of cultural and political change, but forces she scrutinizes most closely remain those of the heart. Hadley is, as always, masterfully tracking the contours of desire to its end point and beyond. All of it is aftermath.” —The Nation

“Free Love is beautifully structured and brilliantly paced. It displays Tessa Hadley’s extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive.... Phyllis Fischer’s quest for love and escape is created with drama and excitement, but also with slow care and real delicacy and sympathy.” —Colm Toibin

Wonderful wonderful book.

Just absolutely loved it. Hadley is a master, she draws her characters so vividly. Fantastic read too.