October 8, 2018
Hadley’s perceptive, finely wrought novel (after Bad Dreams) traces the impact of the death of one man on three others. When affable art gallery owner Zachary dies suddenly in his 50s, he leaves behind not only his flamboyant and determinedly helpless widow, Lydia, but also the couple closest to them, Alex and Christine. Alex, an acerbic failed poet turned primary school teacher, and Christine, an artist who frequently exhibits her work in Zach’s gallery, have a long, complicated relationship with Zach and Lydia. Christine and Lydia, friends since childhood, met the two slightly older men when the young women were just out of college. Lydia set her sights on the melancholy Alex, who barely noticed her. Instead, he settled into a relationship with the at first reluctant Christine after her brief fling with Zach, who was actually infatuated with Lydia. Over the years, the two couples settled into the passive happiness of married life, but Zach’s death forces Lydia, Alex, and Christine to finally confront the feelings Alex and Lydia have for each other. As the two move forward together, and Christine, to her own surprise, discovers that she relishes time alone, Alex and Christine’s daughter Grace decides to make a death mask of her father, and moves in with Alex and Christine’s daughter Isobel. Hadley is a writer of the first order, and this novel gives her the opportunity to explore, with profound incisiveness and depth, the inevitable changes inherent to long-lasting marriages.

Starred review from October 15, 2018
The 30-year bond between a quartet of close friends--two couples--comes unglued when one of them dies unexpectedly in Hadley's (The Past, 2016, etc.) quietly riveting latest.Christine and Alex and Lydia and Zachary have been close since their early 20s; now in their 50s, they're still close, the friendships among them still anchoring their lives. And then one night, Christine and Alex are listening to music when the telephone rings. It's Lydia, from the hospital. Zachary is dead. He was fine, at his office at the gallery, talking about the next show, and then he wasn't. Then he keeled over and was dead. For all the years they've known each other, Zachary has been a gentle force of nature. "Of all of us," Christine thinks, "he's the one we couldn't afford to lose." In the immediate aftermath of his death, the families band together: Alex goes to collect Lydia and Zachary's daughter from college; Lydia comes to live, for a while, with her best friends. The women have been close since childhood, Lydia theatrical and romantic and borderline frivolous; Christine serious and artistic, the practical one of the pair. Shortly after university, the women met Alex and Zachary, also childhood friends. In the early days, it was Lydia who was in love with Alex, although he was unhappily married to somebody else. Zachary was well-matched with Christine. The partnerships evolved without animosity: Zachary married Lydia, in the end. Alex married Christine. For three decades, they remained close, the history between them no threat to the happy present. But after Zachary's death, their pleasant equilibrium is thrown forever off-kilter, as remnants from the past bubble up to the surface. A four-person character study--here as always, Hadley is a master of interpersonal dynamics--the novel captures the complexity of loss. Their grief is not only for Zachary; it is for the lives they thought they knew.Restrained and tender.

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December 1, 2018

Couples Alexandr and Christine, Zachary and Lydia have been tight as glue since their twenties and thought that nothing would change. Decades later, when a distraught Lydia calls Alex and Christine to report that Zach has died, she's immediately invited to come live with her old friends. But grandly generous Zach was their foundation, and the three left behind find that grief doesn't bring them closer, instead highlighting old conflicts. From the lusciously articulate Hadley, winner of the 2016 Windham Campbell Prize.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

"With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she's one of the greatest stylists alive.... To read Hadley's fiction is to grow self-conscious in the best way: to recognize with astonishment the emotions playing behind our own expressions, to hear articulated our own inchoate anxieties....The whole grief-steeped story should be as fun as a dirge, but instead it feels effervescent—lit not with mockery but with the energy of Hadley's attention, her sensitivity to the abiding comedy of human desire.... Extraordinary." — Ron Charles, Washington Post

"[Hadley] is a gifted anatomist of human relationships, with those among family members being her specialty. Her particular genius lies in the elegance and precision with which she captures the fleeting emotion, the passing, indefinable perception or tiny epiphany." — Katherine Powers, Wall Street Journal

"Gorgeous, utterly absorbing.... More than many of her contemporaries, the British writer Tessa Hadley understands that life is full of moments when the past presses up against the present, and when the present transforms the past. Her brilliant new novel, Late in the Day, explores both with equal urgency." — Margot Livesey, Boston Globe

"Brilliant.... In the hands of a lesser novelist, the intricate tangle of lives at the center of Late in the Day would feel like just such a self-satisfied riddle or, at best, like sly narrative machinations. Because this is Tessa Hadley, it instead feels earned and real and, even in its smallest nuances, important.... It's to her credit that Hadley manages to be old-fashioned and modernist and brilliantly postmodern all at once.... We've seen this before, and we've never seen this before, and it's spectacular." — Rebecca Makkai, The New York Times Book Review

"Sumptuous... Hadley's fiction—both long and short—has, with a delicious, detached clarity, observed the shape of relationships: their unconventionality, their transgressions. She is a superb stylist, with none of the pretensions that have latterly been attached to such a term: dispassionate, yet voluptuous in her prose." — Financial Times

"Strange, unsettling — eerily beautiful, discomfiting, stay-up-late-addictive, sometimes hair-raising.... Always, it's Hadley's high-res magnification on the interplay of marital (and friendship, and parental) dynamics that supplies her work's steady gold." — Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle

"An immersive tale of two intertwined couples.... Hadley tells a juicy story in the voice of a poet." — People's Best New Books

"Tessa Hadley is well-known for her inimitable portrayal of character and her latest effort, Late in the Day, is no disappointment.... A smart exploration of human nature, desire, and friendship." — Vanity Fair

"Her prose has the penetrating quality of Henry James at his most accessible... and is alert, as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen were, to how time sculpts, warps or casually destroys us.... A quiet triumph." — Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

"The British novelist does what she does best: excavate the tensions and traumas that linger in the most seemingly normal families and relationships." — Huffington Post

"Reading Late in the Day feels both prurient—we are so deeply inside the emotional rhythms of this home—and marvelous, in its elevation of a boring middle-class marriage into a fable of warring identities." — New...