Carol Anshaw
With Clever Girl, Tessa Hadley examines the blunt force of young adulthood. She deftly portrays this short stretch of time in which we make many of the most important decisions of our lives, all while driving under the influence of ignorance and inchoate sexuality.
Financial Times (London)
Involving…. Intrigues and engages…. The smooth narrative echoes Hadley’s cool and precise prose.... There’s plenty of family drama (including murder) but Hadley’s strength is in describing what is often left unnoticed.
Ron Rash
One woman’s story comes to exemplify a whole era in this marvelous novel. Tessa Hadley writes with a poet’s attentiveness to language, and finds the profound and wondrous in the seemingly quietest of lives.
Anne Landsman
A rich, absorbing novel.
Melanie Cremins
Ultimately, this is a beautiful and precisely drawn portrait of an everywoman, both extraordinary and ordinary.
Meg Wolitzer
Subtle....A story that doesn’t overreach, about a character who feels real, told in prose that isn’t ornate yet is startlingly exact. The effect is a fine and well-chosen pileup of experiences that gather meaning and power….Stella may not stand out, but Tessa Hadley certainly does.
People
Looking for the next Kate Atkinson or Alice Munro? Pick up this lovely novel.
Vogue
Irresistibly charming.
New York Times
Hadley’s prose is both precise and imaginative….Her genteel style belies the many pointed insights she has to offer about female ambition and desire.
Evening Standard
Hadley remains so fixed in Stella’s viewpoint that whatever this stubborn, lonely, eloquent character has to tell us, we accept....Subtle, intelligent, and realistic storytelling.
The Observer
Accomplished, elegant....This novel is the life story of an ordinary, middle-aged woman-Stella. Only that she is not ordinary because Tessa Hadley is writing her into existence and is behind her like a following wind….Hadley writes as a masterly illustrator might draw.
New Statesman
Tessa Hadley is a clever writer who likes to play with form. Like Amish quilts, her novels are made up of homespun, domestic material, delicately worked over. Then you step back and see the bold structural decisions behind their composition
Tricia SpringstubbCleveland Plain Dealer
Like Alice McDermott’s Someone, it’s the story of an ordinary woman’s life, so closely observed it becomes sublime…..It’s Hadley’s brilliance to show how the jarring desires, the pieces that don’t fit together, nonetheless make a full life.
Toronto Star
Tessa Hadley is wonderful at surprising us with the domestic dramas that stir the embers of everyday life….Her reminiscences can resemble little bombs….Hadley can make even English weather seem enthralling.
The National
It’s this very ordinariness that makes Hadley’s book so captivating. Clever Girl is one of those glorious novels about nothing in particular and everything there is in life, all at the same time.
Joyce Townsend
A uniquely gifted writer, Hadley, never vague, possesses a narrative voice that moves the characters through their phases with parenthetic irony. Like an artist dabbing in precise luminous details, she has a masterly grasp of pivotal moments and renders them with brilliant economy.
Sam Sacks
Masterful, understated….Clever Girl, like the fiction of V.S. Pritchett or Alice McDermott, is devoted to capturing personality through small actions and expressions, to sparking characters into a vivid flame with a few exact descriptions and to distilling domestic settings into precious, even exalted significance.
The Guardian
Like Munro, Hadley is a writer both exact and lyrical, and there are many pleasures to be found along the way, particularly her sensual descriptions of nature, adolescence, and maternity.
Michele Leber
Hadley displays the keen insight and masterful portrayal of the domestic life for which she has become known.
Christine Pivovar
Hadley achieves a good balance between subtlety and romance, the domestic and the sensational. Though each chapter could stand alone...they add up to a complete, nuanced portrait of a woman who feels as knowable and real as a fictional character can.
Adela Kim
Hadley’s prose is delightful to read.
Jason Diamond
Tessa Hadley gives us everyday people, and makes their lives seem like works of art. Here, in her latest, we follow Stella through life, where Hadley gets all of her failings and little triumphs to shine like prized gems.
Literary Review
This is Hadley’s extraordinary skill as a novelist: to navigate and narrate the fleeting moments in an individual’s life when the future crystallises, by choice and circumstance, for good or for bad....Clever Girl is a remarkable novel by one of this country’s finest, if most unassuming talents.
Sinéad O'Shea
The simplicity of its story is one of this novel’s great strengths: the uncluttered plot allows for Stella’s pains, humiliations, and instances of self-discovery to be confidently inhabited and rendered with emotional precision….This carefully wrought novel transcends mere character study.
The Times
Compelling….For all Stella’s spikiness and grittiness, there is a sensuousness to Hadley’s writing which revels in richly prolix descriptions of sights and states of mind….Hadley has a genius for pithy analysis….The result consistently rings true despite its very literary artistry.
Daily Telegraph
Lives which are unsophisticated yet experienced intensely, and gorgeously erudite prose are the distinguishing features of Tessa Hadley’s writing.
The Independent
An intimate, engrossing and eminently English coming of middle-age story from one of Britain’s finest writers….The narrative is episodic and deeply personal, but slowly coalesces to form a mosaic of British life over the past 50 years.
Lauren Bufferd
Told in a series of perfectly observed moments, Clever Girl is not about what you want your life to be, but what you do with what life hands you….An elegant, accomplished novel.
The Times
Compelling….For all Stella’s spikiness and grittiness, there is a sensuousness to Hadley’s writing which revels in richly prolix descriptions of sights and states of mind….Hadley has a genius for pithy analysis….The result consistently rings true despite its very literary artistry.
Sinéad O'Shea
The simplicity of its story is one of this novel’s great strengths: the uncluttered plot allows for Stella’s pains, humiliations, and instances of self-discovery to be confidently inhabited and rendered with emotional precision….This carefully wrought novel transcends mere character study.
Literary Review
This is Hadley’s extraordinary skill as a novelist: to navigate and narrate the fleeting moments in an individual’s life when the future crystallises, by choice and circumstance, for good or for bad....Clever Girl is a remarkable novel by one of this country’s finest, if most unassuming talents.
The Times
Compelling….For all Stella’s spikiness and grittiness, there is a sensuousness to Hadley’s writing which revels in richly prolix descriptions of sights and states of mind….Hadley has a genius for pithy analysis….The result consistently rings true despite its very literary artistry.
Toronto Star
Tessa Hadley is wonderful at surprising us with the domestic dramas that stir the embers of everyday life….Her reminiscences can resemble little bombs….Hadley can make even English weather seem enthralling.
The Guardian
Like Munro, Hadley is a writer both exact and lyrical, and there are many pleasures to be found along the way, particularly her sensual descriptions of nature, adolescence, and maternity.
People
Looking for the next Kate Atkinson or Alice Munro? Pick up this lovely novel.
Evening Standard
Hadley remains so fixed in Stella’s viewpoint that whatever this stubborn, lonely, eloquent character has to tell us, we accept....Subtle, intelligent, and realistic storytelling.
The Observer
Accomplished, elegant....This novel is the life story of an ordinary, middle-aged woman-Stella. Only that she is not ordinary because Tessa Hadley is writing her into existence and is behind her like a following wind….Hadley writes as a masterly illustrator might draw.
New York Times
Hadley’s prose is both precise and imaginative….Her genteel style belies the many pointed insights she has to offer about female ambition and desire.
Vogue
Irresistibly charming.
The Independent
An intimate, engrossing and eminently English coming of middle-age story from one of Britain’s finest writers….The narrative is episodic and deeply personal, but slowly coalesces to form a mosaic of British life over the past 50 years.
Tricia SpringstubbCleveland Plain Dealer
Like Alice McDermott’s Someone, it’s the story of an ordinary woman’s life, so closely observed it becomes sublime…..It’s Hadley’s brilliance to show how the jarring desires, the pieces that don’t fit together, nonetheless make a full life.
Daily Telegraph
Lives which are unsophisticated yet experienced intensely, and gorgeously erudite prose are the distinguishing features of Tessa Hadley’s writing.
New Statesman
Tessa Hadley is a clever writer who likes to play with form. Like Amish quilts, her novels are made up of homespun, domestic material, delicately worked over. Then you step back and see the bold structural decisions behind their composition
The National
It’s this very ordinariness that makes Hadley’s book so captivating. Clever Girl is one of those glorious novels about nothing in particular and everything there is in life, all at the same time.
Katie Haegele
Hadley’s voluptuous language gives every little thing an immediacy….Like Joyce at his most coherent and exuberant, each of Hadley’s sentences bristles with life, and every moment has significance.
John Williams
Hadley’s prose is both precise and imaginative….Her genteel style belies the many pointed insights she has to offer about female ambition and desire.
Sinead O'Shea
The simplicity of its story is one of this novel’s great strengths: the uncluttered plot allows for Stella’s pains, humiliations, and instances of self-discovery to be confidently inhabited and rendered with emotional precision….This carefully wrought novel transcends mere character study.
