A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family
Clare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied?
So begins Accidents in the Home, a novel that exposes the emotional underbelly of a modern-day family. Clare's narrative is deftly intertwined with the stories of her extended family: her mother, Marian, the clever daughter of a Dostoevsky scholar whose husband leaves her for a beautiful young art student; Clare's half brother, Toby, a dreamy boy who prefers to view life through the lens of a camera; her troubled younger half sister, Tamsin, who develops an apparatus of taboos and rituals to restore order to her chaotic past.
In the world Tessa Hadley has created, family is no longer a steady foundation but a complex web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal. Accidents in the Home offers a startling, intimate portrait of family life in our time.
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From the Inside Flap:
The debut novel of a formidable fictional talent.
An improbable coincidence brings Clare back into contact with someone she once had sex with as a teenager; to complicate matters, he is now going out with her best friend, Helly. The encounter could have just been embarrassing, but it shakes up everything in Clare?s life. Clare and Helly learned to smoke and shoplift together, and even read an old copy of The Female Eunuch together, squeezed side by side on Helly?s bed. Now Clare is married with three small children, bakes her own bread and buys her clothes from the charity shop. Helly is a model and has her image up on billboards ten feet high. And each of them seems to want what the other has.
From the Back Cover:
“Surprising and rewarding…Hadley has pulled off an important and tricky task…. Not many books remind you so directly and forcefully that reading is about creating new ways of seeing the world.” -- New York Times Book Review
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherHenry Holt and Co.
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0805070648
- ISBN 13 9780805070644
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages256
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Rating