Tessa Hadley's Reading List

The author, most recently, of “The Past” finds it “frightening to think about the books that form us. It’s not just Emma Bovary who makes her life decisions . . . based on something that she’s read.”

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By the Book: Tessa Hadley (2015)

NYT By the Book column (2015-12-31).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Wings of the Dove

Henry James · Buy on Amazon

"The marvelous slow opening where Kate Croy waits for her father, walking up and down in his grubby lodgings, hating the fraudulent thing he is. The excited sense, as always with James at his best, that words are freedom, anything is possible."

Silent Dialogues

Alexander Nemerov · Buy on Amazon

"A subtle and tender book by Alexander Nemerov, Silent Dialogues, about the relations, or nonrelations, between his father, the poet Howard Nemerov, and his aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus."

Playthings

Alex Pheby · Buy on Amazon

"Playthings is certainly clever, but I also thought it was marvelously surprising and vivid, something new. Impressed as I haven't been by a new novel for a while."

Faithful and Virtuous Night

Louise Gluck · Buy on Amazon

"I'm loving Louise Gluck's latest collection too, Faithful and Virtuous Night (gorgeously funny title)."

The Widow's Children

Paula Fox · Buy on Amazon

"No one writes plausibly evil characters quite like Paula Fox. The mother in The Widow's Children is one of literature's convincing monsters."

Anne of Green Gables

L.M. Montgomery · Buy on Amazon

"I loved the promise of books that came in whole series, taking up half a library shelf, like Anne of Green Gables or Swallows and Amazons."

The Wouldbegoods

E. Nesbit · Buy on Amazon

"When I read E. Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods, I had no sense of distance between my own 1960s world and her Edwardian one."

The Rainbow

D.H. Lawrence · Buy on Amazon

"I suspect that Lawrence's The Rainbow had a significant impact on the way I was when I was 20."

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