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Clever Girl

Clever Girl

Summary

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

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.
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