Audiobooks by Tessa Hadley

"Brought to you by Penguin. An irresistible novella about two sisters and a night that changes everything, from the master chronicler of our heart’s hidden desires. Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She’d have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it. On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students’ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives. ‘Tessa Hadley is my favourite author’ KATE ATKINSON ‘Few writers give me such consistent pleasure’ ZADIE SMITH ‘Hadley’s extraordinary skill [is] making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive’ COLM TÓIBÍN ‘Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book’ HILARY MANTEL © Tessa Hadley 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024"

Tessa Hadley (Author), Tessa Hadley (Narrator)

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[Spanish] - Amor libre

"En casa de los Fischer, todo está listo para recibir a un invitado a cenar: el joven Nicholas Knight, hijo de una vieja amiga de la familia. Hasta esa calurosa noche de 1967, ni Phyllis, una atractiva ama de casa de cuarenta años, ni su marido Roger, diplomático en el Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, se han detenido a cuestionar su vida en común, sólidamente asentada en una rutina sin sobresaltos y llena de comodidades. Sin embargo, tras la cena, a oscuras en el jardín, Nicholas besa a Phyllis, y los cimientos de ese mundo de fastuosa e ilusoria felicidad se tambalean. Atraída por ese chico contestatario y de aspecto bohemio, Phyllis se arroja a una aventura sentimental que revolucionará su vida hasta hacerle romper con todo, para asombro de su hija Colette, apenas una adolescente a punto de internarse en la vida adulta. La experiencia pondrá en tela de juicio el modo de vida de los Fischer y dejará al descubierto lo que se esconde tras la fachada de las apariencias. Amor libre nos sumerge en aquel vibrante Londres de finales de los sesenta en el que los movimientos contraculturales convivían con los valores burgueses, y lo hace de la mano de Phyllis, una mujer dispuesta a lidiar con la incertidumbre y asumir las consecuencias de abrazar la libertad. Con la misma elegancia y sutileza que ya desplegara en Lo que queda de luz, Tessa Hadley explora los recovecos psicológicos de sus personajes, carga de significado lo cotidiano y crea atmósferas envolventes en una novela que habla de la incontrolable onda expansiva de nuestras decisiones."

Tessa Hadley (Author), Angie Sansón (Narrator)

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After the Funeral

"Brought to you by Penguin. From the incomparable Tessa Hadley, 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 the twelve stories in After the Funeral, 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. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes. As psychologically astute as they are emotionally dense, 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 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.' ©2023 Tessa Hadley (P)2023 Penguin Audio"

Tessa Hadley (Author), Abigail Thaw (Narrator)

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[Spanish] - Lo que queda de luz

"Han sido amigos inseparables durante treinta años: Christine, la discreta pintora; su marido Alex, poeta en su juventud y ahora director de escuela; el exitoso galerista de arte Zachary y su sofisticada esposa Lydia. Una apacible noche de verano, mientras escuchan música clásica en el salón de su casa en Londres, Christine y Alex reciben una llamada; es Lydia, alterada, desde el hospital: Zach acaba de morir. Un mismo sentimiento invade a los tres: han perdido al más generoso y fuerte de los cuatro, el ancla que los mantenía unidos, precisamente aquel a quien no podían permitirse perder. Desconsolada, Lydia se muda con Alex y Christine, y en los meses que siguen, la pérdida, lejos de fortalecer sus vínculos, trae a la superficie antiguos deseos y agravios hasta ahora enterrados en el equilibrio que les brindaba la perfecta cuadratura de su amistad. La voz delicada y poderosa de Tessa Hadley se adentra en las intrincadas y quebradizas redes que sostienen la amistad y el matrimonio, retratando con exquisita sutileza la personalidad de cada uno de los personajes y desenvolviéndose magistralmente entre el presente y el pasado. Con sabiduría y elegancia, Lo que queda de luz nos revela cómo ciertas decisiones que creíamos haber adoptado con profunda convicción son en realidad fruto de un orden que el azar ha ido tejiendo silenciosamente frente a nuestros ojos, que miraban sin ver. 'Tessa Hadley es una de nuestras mejores escritoras, y es inexplicable que no se le preste la atención que merece. Entre sus filas de admiradores, que no dejan de crecer, se encuentran Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie y Zadie Smith. Lo que queda de luz es un nuevo triunfo de la literatura sin efectismos.'—Alex O'Connell, The Times"

Magdalena Palmer (translator), Tessa Hadley (Author), Belén Roca (Narrator)

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Free Love: The exhilarating new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Late in the Day

"Brought to you by Penguin. From Tessa Hadley, bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past, comes a compulsive new novel about one woman's sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London 1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the family's upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them. With scalpel-sharp insight, Tessa Hadley explores her characters' inner worlds, laying bare their fears and longings. Daring and sensual, Free Love is a compulsive, irresistible exploration of romantic love, sexual freedom and living out the truest and most meaningful version of our lives. 'She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today.' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 'Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts.' Hilary Mantel © Tessa Hadley 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022"

Tessa Hadley (Author), Abigail Thaw (Narrator)

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Late in the Day: The classic Sunday Times bestselling novel from the author of Free Love

"Brought to you by Penguin. Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach was the sanest and kindest of them all, the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness. Late in the Day explores the tangled webs at the centre of our most intimate relationships, to expose how beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again shows that she has ‘become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them.’ (Anthony Quinn Guardian) (c) 2019, Tessa Hadley (P) 2019 Penguin Audio"

Tessa Hadley (Author), Abigail Thaw (Narrator)

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Thalia Book Club: Tessa Hadley, Late In The Day

"The acclaimed British novelist and short story master who "recruits admires with each book" (Hilary Mantel) discusses her latest novel with fellow author Colm Tóibín (House of Names). Ingeniously moving between past and present, Late in the Day exposes how infinite alternate configurations lie beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives. With a reading by Rita Wolf (An Ordinary Muslim)."

Tessa Hadley (Author), Colm Toibin, Rita Wolf (Narrator)

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Bad Dreams and Other Stories

"In these short stories it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance, a child awake in the night explores her home, a housekeeper caring for an elderly man uncovers secrets from his past. The stories focus in on crucial moments of transition. Small acts have large consequences and some of them reverberate across decades. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams."

Tessa Hadley (Author), Emma Gregory (Narrator)

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The Past

"Three sisters and a brother meet up in their grandparents’ old house for three long, hot summer weeks. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past, but now they may have to sell it. And under the idyllic surface, there are tensions. Secrets are uncovered and passions erupt as a way of life – bourgeois, literate, ritualised – winds down to its inevitable end."

Tessa Hadley (Author), Antonia Beamish (Narrator)

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Clever Girl

"One woman's life, from childhood to middle age, by Britain's most acute, perceptive novelist of ordinary lives Clever Girl follows the story of Stella, from her childhood with her single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The story is full of drama - violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella's schooldays, two sons by different fathers – yet it is Hadley’s observation of ordinary lives, of the way men and women think and feel and interact, that dazzles."

Tessa Hadley (Author), Julie Teal (Narrator)

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Married Love

"Lottie announces that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; it is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments."

Tessa Hadley (Author), Anne Dover, Judith Boyd, Multiple Narrators (Narrator)

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The London Train

"A compelling and beautifully written new novel from the acclaimed author of The Master Bedroom Paul lives in the Welsh countryside with his wife Elise, and their two young children. Over in London, Cora plans to move back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the constrictions and disappointments of her life. Connecting them is the London train, and a chance meeting that will have immediate and far-reaching consequences for both Paul and for Cora."

Tessa Hadley (Author), Juanita Mcmahon (Narrator)

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