Synopses & Reviews
Clare Menges is the twenty-nine-year-old suburban mother of three, but her comfortable world is disrupted when her best friends lover appears in her life. Anyway Clares perfect life was never what it seemed; the world of her family is a complicated and fraught web of marriages and divorces, half-siblings and stepchildren, broken homes and homes reassembled. As Clares relationships begin to unravel, she notices her life repeating the patterns of those around her. Tessa Hadley constructs a beautifully fashioned and intimate portrait of family life in our times.
Review
"Hadley is a skilled and thoughtful writer, and her characters have much to say about the complexity and durability of marriage, but it's often lost under the weight of guilt and anxiety." Library Journal
Review
"Sometimes annoying, sometimes involving, it's a maddening blend of tedious domestic detail and startling insight. It is most notable for its technical finesse and its dark view of modern relationships." Booklist
Review
"...Hadley charts both the complex workings of the outside world and the tangled inner landscapes of the mind and heart..." Elizabeth Graver, author of The Honey Thief
Synopsis
A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family
Clare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied?
So begins Accidents in the Home, a novel that exposes the emotional underbelly of a modern-day family. Clare's narrative is deftly intertwined with the stories of her extended family: her mother, Marian, the clever daughter of a Dostoevsky scholar whose husband leaves her for a beautiful young art student; Clare's half brother, Toby, a dreamy boy who prefers to view life through the lens of a camera; her troubled younger half sister, Tamsin, who develops an apparatus of taboos and rituals to restore order to her chaotic past.
In the world Tessa Hadley has created, family is no longer a steady foundation but a complex web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal. Accidents in the Home offers a startling, intimate portrait of family life in our time.
Synopsis
A powerful literary debut chronicles a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family a web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal.
About the Author
Tessa Hadley teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University College in Cardiff, Wales, and recently completed a book on the novels of Henry James.
Accidents in the Home is her first novel.