After the Funeral

After the Funeral

‘My new favourite writer’ Marian Keyes

Summary

Sunday Times bestseller Tessa Hadley explores the big consequences of small events in this new collection

'You've either got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it' FINANCIAL TIMES

Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age - everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

These stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality, and dreams.

***A GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***
***ONE OF THE BBC’S '25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023'***

Reviews

  • Consistently pulls you in from the first sentence... The capacity to make readers care from the off about what happens to these imaginary people next is an unquantifiable, indefinable talent that cannot be taught. You've got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it
    Financial Times

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 three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. 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