Critical Praise

“In spare, incisive prose, Hadley probes this pair of only children marked by the deaths of their mothers, playing with chronology to lay open the pasts that shaped them. This is a keenly perceptive and wise novel, illustrating that however important the past is in our lives, only the present, glimpsed in the final pages, truly matters.”

—Booklist

“There is something reassuring yet deliciously unexpected about a Tessa Hadley novel. . . . Hadley’s writing is reliably fluid and absorbing, and her balancing of contemporary issues and the life of the mind faultless.”

—Catherine Taylor, Sunday Telegraph Magazine (London)

“Hadley’s writing is beautiful. . . . Lovers of character-driven literary fiction will enjoy this novel.”

—Library Journal

“At once a melancholy and delightful story. . . . Hadley’s twin narratives are perfectly tuned and heavy with lacerating observations about the way fate works.”

—Publishers Weekly