Accidents in the Home
Accidents in the Home
paperback
Published:
6 March, 2003
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Description
'A novel as tight as a snare-drum and as bright as the moon' Financial Times
Discover the debut novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Late in the Day and Free Love, Tessa Hadley.
Clare and Helly have been friends since school. Now, Clare is married with three small children, she bakes her own bread and buys her clothes from the charity shop. Meanwhile, Helly is an actress and has her golden curves pasted up on billboards ten foot high. Each of them seems to want what the other has.
An improbable coincidence brings Clare back into contact with someone she once had sex with at a teenage party: he's Helly's new boyfriend. The encounter needn't have meant anything - it could just have been funny, or embarrassing - but it seems to have the power to shake up everything in Clare's life.
Accidents in the Home dips in and out of the lives of Clare's complicated, close, fraught family, reaching out into the past for explanation and illumination as well as across the present. This is the debut of a quite formidable fictional talent.
'This writer is a rare and startling gem; she deserves to be read' Guardian
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9780099428589 |
| ISBN10 | 009942858X |
| Number Of Pages | 256 |
| Item Weight | 184 g |
| Product Dimensions | 130 x 196 x 16 mm |
| Publisher / Reseller | Vintage Publishing |
| Format | paperback |
Media Reviews
Few writers give me such consistent pleasure -- Zadie Smith
She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today -- Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
Surprising and rewarding... Hadley has pulled off an important and tricky task... Not many books remind you so directly and forcefully that reading is about creating new ways of seeing the world * New York Times *
Charts with intelligence, humour and unflinching perception the way we mostly fail to realise how we have to live * Times Literary Supplement *
In clear prose that gorgeously fixes nuances so evanescent as to be rare, the novel unfolds an artful, inventive spectrum of opportunity and love - Tessa Hadley is that rare writer who has the convictions of her ambitions * Observer *
GoodReads Reviews
Author's Bio
Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day and Free Love, and four collections of stories: Sunstroke, Married Love, Bad Dreams and After the Funeral. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016 and she has twice been awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, for 2018 and for 2024. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.