Clever Girl, Tessa Hadley
Clever Girl, Tessa Hadley
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Clever Girl

Author: Tessa Hadley

Narrator: Esther Wane

Unabridged: 8 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/28/2020

Categories: Fiction, Family Life, Women


Synopsis

Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives—an ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.

Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley's moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.

Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama—violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley's observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.

About Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, as well as three short-story collections, most recently "Bad Dreams and Other Stories", which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Barbara

Clever is defined as intelligent, ingenious, insightful. It doesn't mean wise, showing good judgement. Stella, the narrator, is certainly clever but rarely wise. Through snapshots of her life, from childhood to middle age, we read how she faces the challenges of each stage of life. This book is not......more

Goodreads review by Jill

Look in the dictionary for the definition of “clever” and you’ll find these words: quick to understand or apply ideas…astute, intelligent, sharp. So is Stella, the protagonist of Tessa Hadley’s novel, truly a clever girl? At one point, Stella answers that question herself: “In the wrong contexts, cle......more