Bad Dreams and Other Stories - Hardcover

The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proved herself to be a champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories, it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be the most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket.

Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminates crucial moments of transition often imperceptible to the protagonists.

A girl accepts a lift in a car from some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and dreams.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Hadley “puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master” (Lily King, author of Euphoria).

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, as well as three short-story collections, most recently Bad Dreams and Other Stories, which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.