The Party Tessa Hadley

Published 07 November 2024
Jonathan Cape is part of Vintage
£12.99 | Hardback

An irresistible novella about two sisters and a night that changes everything, from
the master chronicler of our heart’s hidden desires.

Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She’d have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it.
On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students’ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels
them.

Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and  Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives.

In this irresistible novella of two young women coming of age, Tessa Hadley explores the
ever-changing desires, the sudden revelations and the lasting mysteries that are bound up
with who we are, and who we might become.

’Few writers give me such consistent pleasure’
Zadie Smith, author White Teeth

‘Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book’
Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

‘She is one of the best fiction writers writing today’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus

Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels,
Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the
Day, Free Love and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. She won the Windham Campbell  Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.