Accidents In The Home

At the centre of Tessa Hadley’s extraordinary first novel is Clare, a young mother of three, who finds that marriage to a good man no longer satisfies her and embarks headlong on a disastrous affair. Around her swirl several generations of her large, complex extended family. Every character in this book teeming with characters is soon as familiar as an old friend and after a few pages the reader is not looking in from the outside, but wholly immersed in a brilliantly realised fictional world. Accidents in the Home is the debut of a quite formidable fictional talent.