Liars and Saints

 Tessa Hadley began her adult life as a schoolteacher; she found the work so difficult, she would wake up in a panic every day. When she escaped to a new role--motherhood--she would tell herself, "No matter how many tantrums there are, no matter the tears.....I do NOT have to teach today." As her kids grew older, Hadley found herself writing about Henry James, and she found herself writing stories. She badly, badly wanted to publish her fiction--and so, in her mid-forties, she launched a new career. Now, in her sixties, she is seen as one of the great writers of realist fiction, next to Colm Toibin, Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel. "Free Love," Hadley's new novel, is about family. (All her books are about family.) It's 1967, and a woman, Phyllis, finds herself vaguely interested in the revolutionary stirrings in London. Phyllis is forty and trapped in an "OK" marriage, with children. A young guest--a friend's son--visits, and Phyllis tries to flirt....

How much can you pack into an opening paragraph? They were listening to music when the telephone rang. It was a summer's evening, nine o'clock. They had finished supper and Christine was listening with intensity, sitting with her feet tucked under her in the armchair; she recognised the music although she didn't know what it was. Alex had chosen it, he hadn't consulted her and now she stubbornly wouldn't ask--he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn't know. He lay on the sofa in the bay window with a book open in his hand, not reading it, the book dropped across his chest; he was watching the sky outside. Their flat was on the first floor and the sitting-room window looked out over a wide street lined with plane trees. A gang of parakeets zipped across from the park, and the purple-brown darkness of the copper beech next door fumed against the turquoise sky, swallowing the last light. A blackbird silhouetted with open beak on a branch must be singing...

Alice was the first to arrive, but she discovered as she stood at the front door that she had forgotten her key. The noise of their taxi receding, like an insect burrowing between the hills, was the only sound at first in the still afternoon, until their ears got used to other sounds: the jostling of water in the stream that ran at the bottom of the garden, a tickle of tiny movements in the hedgerows and grasses. At least it was an afternoon of balmy warmth, its sunlight diffused because the air was dense with seed floss, transparent-winged midges, pollen; light flickered on the grass, and under the silver birch leaf-shadows shifted, blotting their penny-shapes upon one another. Shifting through her bag Alice put on a show of amusement and scatty self-deprecation. She was famously hopeless with keys. She had come with a young man who was her ex-boyfriend's son and on the train she had been preoccupied with the question of what stage of life she was at, whether people seeing them wo...

Tessa Hadley's story collection, "Bad Dreams," was among the very best books published last year, though I'm not sure many people read it. Here's how the first story starts: Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed. This happened a long time ago, in Surrey, in the sixties, when parents were more careless. She was home from boarding school for the summer, and day after day the sun rose into a cloudless sky, from which Jane couldn't unfix the word "cerulean," which she'd learned in the art room. (She wasn't clever or literary, and was nervous of new words, which seemed to stick to her.) "Cerulean" was more of a blank, baking glare than mere merry blue. It prised its way each morning like a chisel through the crack between Jane's flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed tightly shut in an effort to stay in her dreams. It wasn't acceptable in Jane's kind of family to complain ...