Publishers Weekly
★ 12/20/2021
The poignant, ironic latest from Hadley (Late in the Day) is drenched in the atmosphere of late-1960s Britain, when the lives of women seemed to be changing radically, but maybe, in fact, weren’t so much. In 1967, Phyllis Fischer is 40 years old, “pleased with her life” as a housewife in suburban London, married to civil servant Roger, and mother to charming nine-year-old Hugh and discontented 15-year-old Colette. But, as the detached, observant narrator notes, “under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged.” Soon Phyllis is involved, to Colette’s chagrin, in an affair with Nicholas, the 20-something son of family friends. What seems at first to be a simple tale of adultery and its consequences twists into something between a “cosmic comedy” (as Nicholas’s mother calls it) and a “situation as fatally twisted as a Greek drama” (according to the narrator) as the affair reveals unexpected connections between Phyllis’s family and Nicholas’s. The narrator’s wise, disaffected view of life homes in on the shakiness of Phyllis’s sentimental education. In keen, lush prose, Hadley conveys the many ways her characters delude themselves amid fraught relationships between parents and children as well as between lovers. The result is sumptuous and surprising. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
A deceptively expansive novel, filled with idiosyncratic characters and a distinctive flavor of the times. . . . A domestic novel of manners, erotic abandon, and cultural change, Free Love is as eclectic and alive as the time it captures.” — NPR's Fresh Air
“Tessa Hadley has few rivals in portraying the dynamics of families and the intricate weave of emotional affiliations among members. She is a genius at capturing fugitive thoughts and memories, the propulsive energy of desire, and the provisional reasoning that constitute inner being. . . . Free Love is a penetrating, extraordinarily subtle novel about an unsubtle era.” — Wall Street Journal
“A tragicomic exploration of how one woman’s erotic awakening revolutionizes her sense of who she is, what she must do and what that will cost.” — Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Exquisite and sensuous prose. . . The stories of break and repair in this novel are wonderfully unpredictable.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Hadley’s arresting novel offers a backward glance that helps show us a way forward” — Los Angeles Times
“[A] brilliantly observed novel.” — People, Pick of the Week
“Free Love is a fresh, moving evocation of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” — NPR
“Free Love is beautifully structured and brilliantly paced. It displays Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive. Phyllis Fischer's quest for love and escape is created with drama and excitement, but also with slow care and real delicacy and sympathy.” — Colm Tóibín
"Free Love is a perfect example of the Tessa Hadley problem: her books are so easy on the eye, such a joy to read, it’s possible to forget how artful, profound and subtle they are–and what a great writer she is. " — Geoff Dyer
“Every book Tessa Hadley writes makes her readers look forward keenly to the next. Free Love is a beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate.” — Hilary Mantel
“In keen, lush prose, Hadley conveys the many ways her characters delude themselves amid fraught relationships between parents and children as well as between lovers. The result is sumptuous and surprising.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Think The Graduate told from Mrs. Robinson’s point of view…. Hadley’s indelible portrait of a woman defying conventions in pursuit of personal fulfillment flawlessly captures a signature time with timeless sensitivity and passion.” — Booklist, starred review
|Los Angeles Times
Hadley’s arresting novel offers a backward glance that helps show us a way forward
NPR
Free Love is a fresh, moving evocation of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
NPR's Fresh Air
A deceptively expansive novel, filled with idiosyncratic characters and a distinctive flavor of the times. . . . A domestic novel of manners, erotic abandon, and cultural change, Free Love is as eclectic and alive as the time it captures.
Wall Street Journal
Tessa Hadley has few rivals in portraying the dynamics of families and the intricate weave of emotional affiliations among members. She is a genius at capturing fugitive thoughts and memories, the propulsive energy of desire, and the provisional reasoning that constitute inner being. . . . Free Love is a penetrating, extraordinarily subtle novel about an unsubtle era.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Exquisite and sensuous prose. . . The stories of break and repair in this novel are wonderfully unpredictable.
Pick of the Week People
[A] brilliantly observed novel.
Geoff Dyer
"Free Love is a perfect example of the Tessa Hadley problem: her books are so easy on the eye, such a joy to read, it’s possible to forget how artful, profound and subtle they are–and what a great writer she is. "
Hilary Mantel
Every book Tessa Hadley writes makes her readers look forward keenly to the next. Free Love is a beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate.”
Colm Tóibín
Free Love is beautifully structured and brilliantly paced. It displays Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive. Phyllis Fischer's quest for love and escape is created with drama and excitement, but also with slow care and real delicacy and sympathy.
Wall Street Journal
Tessa Hadley has few rivals in portraying the dynamics of families and the intricate weave of emotional affiliations among members. She is a genius at capturing fugitive thoughts and memories, the propulsive energy of desire, and the provisional reasoning that constitute inner being…Free Love is a penetrating, extraordinarily subtle novel about an unsubtle era.
Los Angeles Times
Hadley’s arresting novel offers a backward glance that helps show us a way forward
starred review Booklist
Think The Graduate told from Mrs. Robinson’s point of view…. Hadley’s indelible portrait of a woman defying conventions in pursuit of personal fulfillment flawlessly captures a signature time with timeless sensitivity and passion.”
New York Times Book Review on Late in the Day
Brilliant.... In the hands of a lesser novelist, the intricate tangle of lives at the center of Late in the Day would feel like just such a self-satisfied riddle or, at best, like sly narrative machinations. Because this is Tessa Hadley, it instead feels earned and real and, even in its smallest nuances, important.... It’s to her credit that Hadley manages to be old-fashioned and modernist and brilliantly postmodern all at once.... We’ve seen this before, and we’ve never seen this before, and it’s spectacular.
Financial Times on Late in the Day
Sumptuous… Hadley’s fiction—both long and short—has, with a delicious, detached clarity, observed the shape of relationships: their unconventionality, their transgressions. She is a superb stylist, with none of the pretensions that have latterly been attached to such a term: dispassionate, yet voluptuous in her prose.
Ron Charles
With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive. . . . To read Hadley’s fiction is to grow self-conscious in the best way: to recognize with astonishment the emotions playing behind our own expressions, to hear articulated our own inchoate anxieties. . . . The whole grief-steeped story should be as fun as a dirge, but instead it feels effervescent—lit not with mockery but with the energy of Hadley’s attention, her sensitivity to the abiding comedy of human desire. . . . Extraordinary.
New York Times Book Review
Brilliant.... In the hands of a lesser novelist, the intricate tangle of lives at the center of Late in the Day would feel like just such a self-satisfied riddle or, at best, like sly narrative machinations. Because this is Tessa Hadley, it instead feels earned and real and, even in its smallest nuances, important.... It’s to her credit that Hadley manages to be old-fashioned and modernist and brilliantly postmodern all at once.... We’ve seen this before, and we’ve never seen this before, and it’s spectacular.
Financial Times
Sumptuous… Hadley’s fiction—both long and short—has, with a delicious, detached clarity, observed the shape of relationships: their unconventionality, their transgressions. She is a superb stylist, with none of the pretensions that have latterly been attached to such a term: dispassionate, yet voluptuous in her prose.
Financial Times
Sumptuous… Hadley’s fiction—both long and short—has, with a delicious, detached clarity, observed the shape of relationships: their unconventionality, their transgressions. She is a superb stylist, with none of the pretensions that have latterly been attached to such a term: dispassionate, yet voluptuous in her prose.
Library Journal - Audio
★ 09/01/2022
Set against the backdrop of 1960s London with counterculture in full swing, respectability loses its allure when Phyllis meets Nicky, and a spontaneous kiss sparks passion. The ensuing affair between this stifled housewife and a dilettante writer half her age transforms not only Phyllis, as she encounters people and ideas far outside her comfortably bourgeoisie experience, but each member of her abandoned family. Teenaged Colette seizes the chance to redefine herself at school, while struggling at home to take over her mother's routines for sensitive younger brother Hugh and their stiffly stoic father Roger. Through her characters' exquisitely rendered inner lives, Hadley (The Past) reveals a web of impulse, yearning, regret, and long-kept secrets that ensnare even when liberation and happiness seem within reach. Narrator Abigail Thaw's unobtrusive, fluent narration allows listeners to savor the crisp precision of Hadley's prose and to sink easily into the story in all its sweet sensuality and bitter realism. Thaw's Standard English accent evokes both the privilege and the confinement of British class hierarchy, and her gentle voice is a pure pleasure to hear. VERDICT Personal and societal growing pains are deftly contrasted in Hadley's highly recommended historical drama.—Lauren Kage
Library Journal
★ 04/02/2022
On a warm evening in the summer of 1967, Nicky Knight pays a grudging visit to the home of Roger and Phyllis Fischer, old friends of his parents. The desultory evening is made even worse by the Fischers' glum teenage daughter and by Phyllis's unwelcome attempt at French cuisine. But the evening holds a surprise. While hunting down a child's missing sandal in the dark garden, Phyllis and Nicky exchange a hot kiss, the spark that will lead Phyllis to upend her conventional life. Leaving home and family behind, she follows Nicky to his room in the Everglade, a once grand building and now home to a motley assortment of students, artists, and low-paid workers. While her sudden disappearance perplexes her well-meaning husband and abandoned children, Phyllis exults in her newfound freedom as much as she delights in Nicky's seedy digs and louche friends. But can it last? VERDICT A wonderful storyteller, the Windham-Campbell Prize—winning Hadley (The Past) paints an evocative picture of the free-loving, bell-bottomed, pot-smoking, anti-establishment generation. With its Sixties vibe, vivid characters, and twisty plot, this book is a winner.—Barbara Love
