Booklist Reviews
Hadley (The Past?, 2016) brings readers into the world of a complicated quartet of friends and lovers. Spanning more than 30 years, the story introduces Alexandr, Christine, Lydia, and Zachary on the day a sudden heart attack claims Zachary's life. Lydia is so distraught at the loss of her husband that Christine invites her to stay with her and Alex. At first, the long relationships among the quartet seem straightforward: Christine and Alex have been married for decades, as had Lydia and Zachary. But then Hadley brings readers back in time to when Christine and Lydia, friends from childhood, first met Alex and Zachary. Back then, Alex was a French professor married to his first wife, Juliet, and it was Lydia who was hopelessly infatuated with him and who schemed to set Christine up with Alex's good friend, Zachary. Hadley traces the friends' relationships through the decades, not only revealing the evolution of their friendships and romances but also the rise and fall of their youthful ambitions and artistic passions. A layered and compelling read. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
Late in the Day
BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, January 2019
The 30-year bond between two couples is irrevocably broken when one of the friends abruptly dies in Tessa Hadley's Late in the Day. This well-drawn and absorbing character study bears all the hallmarks of Hadley's best work: It's perceptive, intelligent and written with astonishing emotional depth.
Serious but artistic Christine and dreamy, sensuous Lydia have been friends since school. During college, Lydia nursed an unrequited crush on their married French teacher, Alexandr, and Christine began a romance with his friend Zachary. Over the years, the relationships slowly shifted, and the women reallocated their affections without any apparent bitterness or jealousies. Lydia and Zachary eventually married and had a daughter; shortly after, Alex and Christine did the same. The two couples remained active in each other's lives, socializing, traveling together and eventually working together when Christine began to show her art in Zachary's gallery. Even their daughters became good friends.
But Zachary's sudden death from a massive heart attack disturbs the equilibrium. At first, the remaining three are committed to providing comfort and solace for each other. Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine, and Alex goes to Glasgow to bring Lydia and Zachary's daughter home from college. But without Zachary to stabilize the quartet, old grievances rise up and unhealed wounds are opened. For Christine, Zachary's death means that she can no longer find a reason to make art. She locks the door to her studio and grows quietly resentful of her husband and best friend. On the other hand, Lydia finds new strength, deciding to be more involved in the business of the gallery and her departed husband's family trust.
As in Hadley's earlier novels (The Past and Clever Girl), sexual desire proves an overwhelming force that shapes decisions and actions, but Late in the Day is also about the remaking of an artist and the emergence of self, even in middle age. A master of interpersonal dynamics, Hadley captures the complexity of loss, grief and friendship with a clarity of vision that brings the natural and material worlds into sharp focus.
This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
The 30-year bond between a quartet of close friends—two couples—comes unglued when one of them dies unexpectedly in Hadley's (The Past, 2016, etc.) quietly riveting latest. Christine and Alex and Lydia and Zachary have been close since their early 20s; now in their 50s, they're still close, the friendships among them still anchoring their lives. And then one night, Christine and Alex are listening to music when the telephone rings. It's Lydia, from the hospital. Zachary is dead. He was fine, at his office at the gallery, talking about the next show, and then he wasn't. Then he keeled over and was dead. For all the years they've known each other, Zachary has been a gentle force of nature. "Of all of us," Christine thinks, "he's the one we couldn't afford to lose." In the immediate aftermath of his death, the families band together: Alex goes to collect Lydia and Zachary's daughter from college; Lydia comes to live, for a while, with her best friends. The women have been close since childhood, Lydia theatrical and romantic and borderline frivolous; Christine serious and artistic, the practical one of the pair. Shortly after university, the women met Alex and Zachary, also childhood friends. In the early days, it was Lydia who was in love with Alex, although he was unhappily married to somebody else. Zachary was well-matched with Christine. The partnerships evolved without animosity: Zachary married Lydia, in the end. Alex married Christine. For three decades, they remained close, the history between them no threat to the happy present. But after Zachary's death, their pleasant equilibrium is thrown forever off-kilter, as remnants from the past bubble up to the surface. A four-person character study—here as always, Hadley is a master of interpersonal dynamics—the novel captures the complexity of loss. Their grief is not only for Zachary; it is for the lives they thought they knew. Restrained and tender. Copyright Kirkus 2018 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Couples Alexandr and Christine, Zachary and Lydia have been tight as glue since their twenties and thought that nothing would change. Decades later, when a distraught Lydia calls Alex and Christine to report that Zach has died, she's immediately invited to come live with her old friends. But grandly generous Zach was their foundation, and the three left behind find that grief doesn't bring them closer, instead highlighting old conflicts. From the lusciously articulate Hadley, winner of the 2016 Windham Campbell Prize.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal.Library Journal Reviews
The peaceful, settled lives of school headmaster Alexandr and his artist wife, Christine, are upended by a phone call from their oldest friend, Lydia, telling them that husband Zachary has suddenly dropped dead. When they had all first connected years earlier, the pairings were reversed. Lydia had developed a huge crush on Alex, her handsome French teacher, who also happened to be married with a young son. First offering to babysit and gradually insinuating herself into Alex's group of friends, Lydia picked out Zachary for Christine. But when Alex's marriage began to come apart, he was drawn instead to Christine, just as his close friend Zach was falling for Lydia. Marriages and a daughter for each couple tightened their bonds, and their lives followed parallel and symbiotic paths until Zach's untimely death turned things upside down.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Hadley's perceptive, finely wrought novel (after