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 these twelve stories, 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. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on
vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through
disenchanted eyes.
As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, 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
and Other Stories 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."
