After the Funeral
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After the Funeral
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Narrated by:
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Abigail Thaw
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By:
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Tessa Hadley
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
From the incomparable Tessa Hadley, a masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships.
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. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie'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.
As psychologically astute as they are emotionally dense, 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 of making small canvases inexhaustibly new.... Compassionate and luminous, Hadley sees them all - or should I say, she sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys'.
©2023 Tessa Hadley (P)2023 Penguin AudioCritic reviews
What listeners say about After the Funeral
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Rachel Redford
- 24-07-23
So much in so few words
Tessa Hadley is brilliant at creating so much in an economical phrase. What a freight of meaning there is behind the woman whose husband is ‘more or less on board’, or the couple sitting together ‘intimately not speaking’! Each of these richly textured stories is more of a novella than a short story leaving you both satisfied and yet regretting there is not more.
Hadley’s scenarios and frames of reference are cultured , subtle and enriching. Children’s upturned faces look like those carved on an altar piece; a woman has Elizabeth Siddal’s auburn hair whilst another feels herself like George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, and another identifies with Emma Bovary.
The themes of death, growing old, fraught relationships, especially between mothers and daughters and between siblings, are threaded through these stories. Hadley delicately lays bare deep and complex feelings as wide- ranging as the agonies of adolescence and the dawning of old age. Particularly remarkable is her presentation of the labyrinthine emotions of bereavement.
Most (but not all) of Hadley’s fathers and husbands die or deceive (or both) ,their relationships with their children frail on account years of eternal absences spent absorbed in work or research. Hadley is especially effective at detailing the past and then shifting to the present. The chance meeting with the man a single woman was once married to is made outstandingly poignant in just so few few words. I loved the three middle aged sisters gathered in their old family home slipping into their childhood habits, but now burdened with their ‘heavy shelves of bosom’. In Hadley’s spare prose, we understand how t hose ‘shelves’ stand for so much more than mere bosom.
The stories are studded with powerful changes of mood, as when a hedonistic family party changes gear when a child almost drowns. Lives which had initially been optimistically embraced can turn out to be a disappointing entrapment. Thus the eager young woman who has married her much older university tutor finds that his unwelcome , damaged little daughter has become her responsibility whilst he buries himself in his work.
In February 2019 I reviewed Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day on my Audible Listener Page which was, like After the Funeral, read by Abigail Thaw. She reads both beautifully. Her voice is a pleasure to listen to and she is impressively sensitive to every nuance. A perfect match of text and narrator!
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- marj
- 03-10-23
Dull and pointless stories
This came highly recommended to me but I feel very let down. Pleasant little takes in themselves but lacking in any punch, drama or twists to make them satisfying. Kept listening to each new story in the hope of something more interesting. Sadly , no luck. A shame. Abigail Thaw read them beautifully but even she couldn’t make them worth listening to.
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