Tessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships.

A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close.

In Tessa Hadley's stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[A] collection of Hadley's miraculous short stories. Deft and resonant, they encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived." New York Times

"Hadley's stories span years, and her characters rarely end up where they started. While the changes they undergo and the realizations they come to aren't always seemly, they're thrilling to witness." Library Journal

"A collection of strikingly original narratives." Kirkus Reviews

Tessa Hadley's first novel, Accidents in the Home was longlisted for The Guardian's First Book Award. Four of the stories in Sunstroke were published in The New Yorker. Hadley lives in Cardiff, Wales. Her new novel, Master Bedroom will be published by Henry Holt in August 2007.