Sunstroke and Other Stories
More glorious short stories! And as ever with Tessa Hadley, apparently ordinary family life is somehow unsettled. Hadley seems a magician as she flits between viewpoints, sometimes in the space of a single sentence. She does this exceptionally well in the title story of this collection, ‘Sunstroke’. It’s a masterclass in the mess of relationships between husbands and wives, friends, husbands who are only friends because of their wives, the outsider. She is the best of short story writers, and so you know when she says ‘they tell each other everything, almost everything’ those last two words are going to mean something quite important – and of course they do…