A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family
Clare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied?
So beginsAccidents in the Home, a novel that exposes the emotional underbelly of a modern-day family. Clare's narrative is deftly intertwined with the stories of her extended family: her mother, Marian, the clever daughter of a Dostoevsky scholar whose husband leaves her for a beautiful young art student; Clare's half brother, Toby, a dreamy boy who prefers to view life through the lens of a camera; her troubled younger half sister, Tamsin, who develops an apparatus of taboos and rituals to restore order to her chaotic past.
In the world Tessa Hadley has created, family is no longer a steady foundation but a complex web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal.Accidents in the Homeoffers a startling, intimate portrait of family life in our time.
TESSA HADLEYteaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. She is the author of
Sunstroke and Other Stories,
Everything Will Be All Right, and
Accidents in the Home.
Sunstroke and Other Storieswas a
New York TimesNotable Book of 2007, and
Accidents in the Homewas long-listed for
The Guardian's First Book Award. Her short stories have appeared in
The New Yorker.She lives in Cardiff, Wales.
[A] surprising and rewarding novel...a panorama of a contemporary kind of family life. The New York Times Book Review
Accidents in the Homeis a stylish, skillful first novel. Hadley is an acute observer of the insinuations of the stranlcR
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