Tessa Hadley 
Clever Girl 
A Novel

Clever Girl is an indelible story of one womans life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britains leading literary lights Tessa Hadleythe author of the New York Times Notable Books Married Love and The London Train.Like Alice Munro and Colm Tibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary livesan ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadleys moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in dramaviolent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadleys observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.