Publisher's Weekly Review
Young women and girls take the measure of themselves in Hadley's remarkably precise and perceptive collection of short stories, set in the middle-class Britain of the 1950s and '60s and in the present day. Chance encounters disrupt the punctiliously observed rituals of daily life, often leading to a lifetime of consequence for Hadley's characters. In the excellent "An Abduction," Jane Allsop's first sexual experience, at 15, is not traumatic in any ordinary sense, but affects her deeply-whereas the Oxford student she sleeps with retains no memory of it. In "Experience," Laura, a new divorcée, finds that "letting go of the strain of yearning" is "a relief," moving on with her life precisely because her attempt at seduction is unsuccessful. In loving families, too, differing viewpoints can lead to resentment and misunderstanding: "Her Share of Sorrow" is the account of an artist-the awkward 10-year-old daughter of an elegant couple-discovering her vocation in writing; in "Bad Dreams," a bookish girl plays a prank that may have lasting repercussions for her parents' marriage. And the young designer making a wedding dress for a classmate in "Silk Brocade" becomes witness to the impact of time and happenstance on even the richest and most beautiful material. In subtly insightful and observant prose, Hadley writes brilliantly of the words and gestures that pass unnoticed "in the intensity of [the] present" but echo without cease. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Women in transition, from marriage to divorce, from young to old, from devoted mother or sister to outcast within her own family these are the lives that Hadley (The Past, 2016) delves into with her masterful command of the intricacies of the mind. A young girl discovers her mother's feelings for another man in One Saturday Morning, while, in An Abduction, another teen learns that her mother is oblivious to her fierce desire for freedom from her quotidian family life. In Experience, a recent divorcée retreats from the world when she house-sits for a friend with a violent ex, and, in Flight, Claire's attempted reunion with her estranged sister ends in humiliation. A sense of sorrow permeates these stories in which raw emotion is laid bare: the longing for connection, for identity, for discovery, for life. Fantasies of what could be collide with the reality of what is. Each story is more memorable than the next as Hadley seduces readers with a reassuring gentleness that craftily covers the steely danger that lies within each flawed and fragile relationship.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, by Arundhati Roy. (Vintage, $16.95.) In her first novel since her Booker Prize-winning book, "The God of Small Things," Roy explores India's political turmoil, particularly the Kashmiri separatist movement, through the lives of social outcasts. Our reviewer, Karan Mahajan, praised the story's "sheer fidelity and beauty of detail," writing that Roy the novelist has returned "fully and brilliantly intact." WHERE THE WATER GOES: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, by David Owen. (Riverhead, $16.) The Colorado is in peril. Drought, climate change and overuse are draining the river - an important source of water, electricity and food. Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, visits farms, reservoirs and power plants along its route, and considers what actions could help preserve the river. WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS, by Bethany Ball. (Grove, $16.) A financial scandal threatens to upend the branches of a Jewish family in this wry debut novel. When Marc, an Israeli transplant in Los Angeles, is implicated in a laundering scheme, the Solomons back on a Jordan River Valley kibbutz must try to make sense of the news. Balancing literary and political history, Ball renders her characters with sensitivity and strains of dark humor. MARTIN LUTHER: Renegade and Prophet, by Lyndal Roper. (Random House, $20.) A penetrating biography focuses on Luther's upbringing, religious formation and inner life as he articulated his theological arguments and grappled with fame and scrutiny. "I want to understand Luther himself," Roper, a historian at Oxford, writes of her project. "I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body." RISE THE DARK, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/ Little, Brown, $15.99.) In Montana, a messianic leader plans to shut down a power grid that supplies electricity to half the country, with a woman taken hostage to ensure the scheme goes through. Her captor is the same man that Markus Novak, a private investigator and the central character, believes killed his wife, drawing together a painful personal reckoning and terrorist plot. SURFING WITH SARTRE: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning, by Aaron James. (Anchor, $15.95.) The author, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, outlines the system of meaning underpinning his favorite pastime. As James writes, if he were to debate with Sartre, one of his intellectual heroes, he'd draw on the tao of surfing: its ideas about freedom, power, happiness and control.
Kirkus Review
Acclaimed novelist Hadley (The Past, 2016, etc.) is back with a collection of 10 quietly explosive short stories that reveal, with unsparing precision, the epic drama simmering beneath the mundanity of everyday life.A woman takes a job as a caretaker for a difficult old man and finds herself entangled in the family's internal politicsand unable to avoid learning the secrets of her employer's past. An indolent 10-year-old, generally a disappointment to her elegant parents, discovers the intoxicating power of fiction on a family vacation in the South of France. A young divorce takes refuge in the empty home of an older and more glamorous acquaintance and becomes increasingly invested in the more intimate details of her hostess's life, first through her diary and then through her ex-lover himself. A mother, now ill, goes to visit her adult daughter in Liverpool and has an odd encounter with a strange young man from the train; a London expat returns to her childhood home in Leeds to reconcile with her sister, long estranged. In the title story, a little girl wakes in the night and is overcome with the desire to "disrupt this world of her home" in more ways than she knows. In the closing piece, a dress designer is commissioned to make an old acquaintance's wedding dress, a venture that is ultimately doomed. Buried under each quotidian moment is the churning of a lifetime; each tiny snapshot seems to offer a window not only into the past, but toward the future. Hadley captures her characters at turning points so subtle they themselves rarely notice them. Ordinary as they are, these are episodes that will echo, softly, throughout her characters' lives. Achingly lovely, though never sentimental, Hadley's collection renders common lives with exquisite grace. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Emma Gregory, with her impressive range of Anglophone accents-differentiated by age, region, country-is the ideal conduit for the ten nuanced, exquisite stories in Hadley's (The Past) latest collection. Loss of innocence looms large in many of the pieces, from a teenager's first sexual experience in "An Abduction" and a woman's discovery of her aging employer's horrifying past in "The Stain" to a daughter witnessing her mother's revealing exchange with a former neighbor in "One Saturday Morning." Uncomfortable revelations (or their denial) plague characters in "Deeds Not Words," about a young teacher having an affair with a married man; in "Experience," in which a woman discovers an attic of secrets in an acquaintance's home where she's sought shelter when her marriage ends; in "Bad Dreams," in which a mother and her young daughter have hugely different interpretations of a night's events; and in "Flight," about estranged, adult sisters who still can't reconcile over their childhood home. Hadley nimbly captures small everyday moments and with masterly agility shows them to be pivotal, course-changing, life-transforming events. VERDICT Wise, stellar, accomplished, Hadley's collection will appeal to literary aficionados who appreciate such luminous (short) storytellers as Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, and Jhumpa Lahiri.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.