Clever Girl - Couverture rigide

“Subtle....A story that doesn’t overreach, about a character who feels real, told in prose that isn’t ornate yet is startlingly exact. The effect is a fine and well-chosen pileup of experiences that gather meaning and power....Stella may not stand out, but Tessa Hadley certainly does.” (Meg Wolitzer, New York Times Book Review)

“Irresistibly charming.” (Vogue)

“Hadley’s prose is both precise and imaginative....Her genteel style belies the many pointed insights she has to offer about female ambition and desire.” (John Williams, New York Times)

“Involving.... Intrigues and engages.... The smooth narrative echoes Hadley’s cool and precise prose.... There’s plenty of family drama (including murder) but Hadley’s strength is in describing what is often left unnoticed.” (Financial Times (London))

“Ultimately, this is a beautiful and precisely drawn portrait of an everywoman, both extraordinary and ordinary.” (Melanie Cremins, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

“One woman’s story comes to exemplify a whole era in this marvelous novel. Tessa Hadley writes with a poet’s attentiveness to language, and finds the profound and wondrous in the seemingly quietest of lives.” (Ron Rash, author of Serena)

“With Clever Girl, Tessa Hadley examines the blunt force of young adulthood. She deftly portrays this short stretch of time in which we make many of the most important decisions of our lives, all while driving under the influence of ignorance and inchoate sexuality.” (Carol Anshaw, author of Carry the One)

“Looking for the next Kate Atkinson or Alice Munro? Pick up this lovely novel about a smart Englishwoman who’s also prickly and prone to misfortune.” (People)

“Hadley’s voluptuous language gives every little thing an immediacy....Like Joyce at his most coherent and exuberant, each of Hadley’s sentences bristles with life, and every moment has significance.” (Katie Haegele, Philadelphia Inquirer)

“A rich, absorbing novel.” (Anne Landsman, Vanity Fair)

Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibín, Tessa Hadley possesses the remarkable ability to transform the mundane into the sublime—an eye for the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives that elevates domestic fiction to literary art. In Clever Girl, she offers the indelible story of one woman's life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today.

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 Englishwoman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley's involving and moving novel follows Stella from childhood, growing up with her single mother in a Bristol bedsit, into the murky waters of middle age.

It is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama—violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley's observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles, pressing us to exclaim with each page, Yes, this is how it is.