Free Love: A Novel
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)
"Exquisite."" —Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate." — Hilary Mantel
From the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past comes a compulsive new novel about one woman's sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London.
1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy.
But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the family's upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them.
With scalpel-sharp insight, Tessa Hadley explores her characters' inner worlds, laying bare their fears and longings. Daring and sensual, Free Love is an irresistible exploration of romantic love, sexual freedom and living out the truest and most meaningful version of our selves – a novel that showcases Hadley's unrivaled ability to "put on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).
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Tessa Hadley. (2022). Free Love: A Novel. Unabridged HarperAudio.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Tessa Hadley. 2022. Free Love: A Novel. HarperAudio.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Tessa Hadley, Free Love: A Novel. HarperAudio, 2022.
MLA Citation (style guide)Tessa Hadley. Free Love: A Novel. Unabridged HarperAudio, 2022.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 3 | 3 |
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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.
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"Exquisite."" —Minneapolis Star Tribune
- ""Brilliantly observed." — People, Pick of the Week
"A beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate." — Hilary Mantel
From the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past comes a compulsive new novel about one woman's sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London.
1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy.
But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the family's upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them.
With scalpel-sharp insight, Tessa Hadley explores her characters' inner worlds, laying bare their fears and longings. Daring and sensual, Free Love is an irresistible exploration of romantic love, sexual freedom and living out the truest and most meaningful version of our selves – a novel that showcases Hadley's unrivaled ability to "put on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).
- ""Brilliantly observed." — People, Pick of the Week
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Starred review from December 20, 2021
The poignant, ironic latest from Hadley (Late in the Day) is drenched in the atmosphere of late-1960s Britain, when the lives of women seemed to be changing radically, but maybe, in fact, weren’t so much. In 1967, Phyllis Fischer is 40 years old, “pleased with her life” as a housewife in suburban London, married to civil servant Roger, and mother to charming nine-year-old Hugh and discontented 15-year-old Colette. But, as the detached, observant narrator notes, “under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged.” Soon Phyllis is involved, to Colette’s chagrin, in an affair with Nicholas, the 20-something son of family friends. What seems at first to be a simple tale of adultery and its consequences twists into something between a “cosmic comedy” (as Nicholas’s mother calls it) and a “situation as fatally twisted as a Greek drama” (according to the narrator) as the affair reveals unexpected connections between Phyllis’s family and Nicholas’s. The narrator’s wise, disaffected view of life homes in on the shakiness of Phyllis’s sentimental education. In keen, lush prose, Hadley conveys the many ways her characters delude themselves amid fraught relationships between parents and children as well as between lovers. The result is sumptuous and surprising.
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Starred review from September 1, 2022
Set against the backdrop of 1960s London with counterculture in full swing, respectability loses its allure when Phyllis meets Nicky, and a spontaneous kiss sparks passion. The ensuing affair between this stifled housewife and a dilettante writer half her age transforms not only Phyllis, as she encounters people and ideas far outside her comfortably bourgeoisie experience, but each member of her abandoned family. Teenaged Colette seizes the chance to redefine herself at school, while struggling at home to take over her mother's routines for sensitive younger brother Hugh and their stiffly stoic father Roger. Through her characters' exquisitely rendered inner lives, Hadley (The Past) reveals a web of impulse, yearning, regret, and long-kept secrets that ensnare even when liberation and happiness seem within reach. Narrator Abigail Thaw's unobtrusive, fluent narration allows listeners to savor the crisp precision of Hadley's prose and to sink easily into the story in all its sweet sensuality and bitter realism. Thaw's Standard English accent evokes both the privilege and the confinement of British class hierarchy, and her gentle voice is a pure pleasure to hear. VERDICT Personal and societal growing pains are deftly contrasted in Hadley's highly recommended historical drama.--Lauren Kage
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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"Exquisite."" —Minneapolis Star Tribune
- ""Brilliantly observed." — People, Pick of the Week
"A beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate." — Hilary Mantel
From the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past comes a compulsive new novel about one woman's sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London.
1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy.
But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses...
- ""Brilliantly observed." — People, Pick of the Week
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