After the Funeral

A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life, from the incomparable Tessa Hadley

'One of the best fiction writers writing today' CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
'Any publication of hers is a cause for celebration' FINANCIAL TIMES
'My new favourite writer' MARIAN KEYES

In each of the twelve stories in After the Funeral, small events have huge consequences. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age - everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

These stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley's celebrated body of work, After the Funeral bears out Claire Messud's observation that 'like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift.'

'There is a ferocious pure aim to Hadley's words that goes right to the heart - of each story, and of this reader' Lucy Caldwell, winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award