It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Married Love

Married Love

'One of the most subtle and sublime contemporary writers' Vogue

Summary

'The ghost of Katherine Mansfield hovers lightly over these deceptively delicate snapshots' Metro

A beguiling collection of short stories from award-winning author of Free Love, The Past and Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley.

Lottie announces at the breakfast table that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior.It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing collection to treasure.

'The most perceptive chronicler since George Eliot of avid, unworldly young women' Guardian

Reviews

  • Few writers give me such consistent pleasure
    Zadie Smith

About the author

Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day, Free Love and four collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love, Bad Dreams and After the Funeral. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more