Few writers give me such consistent pleasure
- Zadie Smith,
She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today
- Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie,
As discrete entities, Hadley’s short stories are intense, miniature novels in themselves; bound together in a novel, they become quietly brilliant, offering an incisive exploration into how life’s individuals episodes add up to a meaningful whole.
- Francesca Angelini, Sunday Times
Hadley is a writer of exceptional intelligence and skill and, for all the apparent conventionality of her vision, hers is a subtly subversive talent.
- Edmund Gordon, Observer
There is something reassuring yet deliciously unexpected about a Tessa Hadley novel.
- Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph
The most astute and sympathetic of writers.
- Susanna Rustin, Guardian
This novel is the life story of an ordinary, middle-aged woman – Stella. Only that she is not ordinary because Tessa Hadley is writing her into existence and is behind her like a following wind… Hadley writes as a masterly illustrator might draw.
- Kate Kellaway, Observer
Hadley’s achievement in her fifth novel is to express a life significantly shaped and often constrained by discomfort – physical, mental, emotional – but a life that nonetheless progresses, mutating from circumstance to circumstance, decade to decade.
- Alex Clark, Times Literary Supplement
Hadley…has a genius for pithy analysis.
- Matthew Dennison, The Times
Gorgeously erudite prose.
- Catherine Taylor, Sunday Telegraph
The fifth novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Free Love, The Past and Late in the Day, Clever Girl is a tale of an ordinary life made extraordinary by the gifts of Tessa Hadley.
Stella was a clever girl, everyone thought so.
Living with her mother and rather unsatisfactory stepfather in suburban respectability she reads voraciously, smokes until her voice is hoarse and dreams of a less ordinary life. When she meets Val, he seems to her to embody everything she longs for - glamour, ideas, excitement and the thrill of the unknown. But these things come at a price and one that Stella despite all her cleverness doesn't realise until it is too late.
'Tessa Hadley writes like a dream' Daily Mail