Try our Advanced SearchShort stories by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Jane HadleyFRSL (born 28 February 1956; née Nichols) is a British author, who writes novels, short stories and nonfiction. Her writing is realistic and often focuses on family relationships. Her novels have twice reached the longlists of the Orange Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and in 2016, she won the Hawthornden Prize, as well as one of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes for fiction. The Windham-Campbell judges describe her as "one of English's finest contemporary writers" and state that her writing "brilliantly illuminates ordinary lives with extraordinary prose that is superbly controlled, psychologically acute, and subtly powerful." As of 2016, she is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Listing 3 stories.
After her husband's ex-wife's 9-year-old daughter visits, a woman is eager to return the girl and have time alone again. However, when she drops the girl off, she is appalled by the state of the girl's home and moved by the girl's desire to go back with her. The next day, she takes the child back in secret.
In the 70s, a depressed, overweight, insecure, intellectual teenage girl stays for two weeks with a wealthy family her mother sews clothes for, the members of whom she considers confident and beautiful. She visits the historic house of her favorite novelist and entertains sexual fantasies about the boys. Years later, after becoming an academic, she reflects on the dynamics of gender and power.
A teenage girl in 1970s England falls in love with a boy who introduces her to Samuel Beckett and Bob Dylan. What starts off as an innocent relationship, however, turns into something that neither of them will ever be able to erase.