LATE IN THE DAY

TESSA HADLEY

Jonathan Cape, 288pp, £16.99

Tessa Hadley’s seventh novel tells the story of two marriages – and their children – and what happens when the adult quartet becomes a threesome after the death – in the opening pages – of its most vivid character. The dramatic beginning provoked one critic to describe it as a ‘romantic comedy pulled by a hearse’. Hadley’s real subject is the greed for life in those who remain. It may be late in the day, suggests the title, but there is still time to begin again. Late in the Day may also refer to Hadley’s late flowering as an artist – she published her first novel aged 46. Her last, The Past, provoked a flurry of ‘unsung genius’ plaudits. Claire Lowdon in the Sunday

Times praised Hadley’s skill ‘at establishing complex situations with a minimum of fuss’. And likened the shifting allegiances of her two couples to ‘the muddled lovers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rendered here in the more sober colours of middle age’. Claire

Harman in the Evening Standard described her as ‘an analyst of small gestures’. Craig Brown in the Mail on

Sunday explored ways in which Hadley’s fiction was related to, but much better than, the despised Hampstead novel of yesterday. He praised the way her characters, who read and write and work – if they work – in the arts ‘change with circumstance’ and remain ‘consistent in their inconsistency’. His only quibble was with ‘Hadley’s use of the dash instead of the inverted comma’.