Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

A Picador Paperback Original

Tessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships.

A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close.

In Tessa Hadley's stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.

From Publishers Weekly Ten elegant stories from Welsh author Hadley (Everything Will Be All Right) explore the various stages of women's experience. The title story, set at a seaside cottage in Wales and told in an austerely omniscient voice, tracks two attractive early-30ish mothers, one married, the other partnered, who each begin a flirtation with a visiting doctor friend. In Mother's Son, the other woman in an adulterous affair that ended 20 years before finds herself ruefully counseling her grown son—the product of the affair—on dealing with his romantic troubles. Each of these beautifully crafted tales (some set in the 1970s) encapsulates a tender, transformative moment for these real characters, such as the provincial vicar's daughter in Buckets of Blood sent up to visit her older sister in Cambridge for the week who finds, to her horror and disappointment, her sister reeling from a miscarriage that puts her, like their worn-out mother, among the ranks of women submerged and knowing amid their biology. In another tale, a man tracks down the now matronly woman who flirted with him when he was a blushing 13-year-old on a seaside holiday with his family 25 years before. Hadley's eerie, knowing portrayals speak to the heart as much as the mind.

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Review "Miraculous . . . Deft and resonant, [these stories] encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived. Hadley never fails to surprise."-- The New York Times Book Review

"Tessa Hadley's gift as a writer is so considerable that her characters' revelations and predicaments linger in the mind long after her narrative has darted off in other directions."--Alice Traux, The New York Times Book Review

"A warm novel that follows the contours of four generations of a family and, in the end, shows us ourselves."--Associated Press on Everything Will Be All Right

"Marvelously intricate . . . Hadley's intelligence puts her in the company of Carol Shields and Doris Lessing."-- The Boston Globe on Accidents in the Home