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After more than twenty years in London, Kate Flynn has returned to her family home in Wales to care for her aging mother. Having cast off her academic career, she is unmoored, and when she runs into a childhood friend, David Roberts, at a concert, she finds herself falling for him, although she knows she’s grasping at anything to fill the sudden emptiness of her life.
For his part, David’s marriage isn’t as solid as it looks—his wife, Suzie, has begun acting strangely, moving out of their bedroom, neglecting their children, and disappearing for days at a time—and he begins to seek refuge with Kate from the newfound chaos of his life.
David’s seventeen-year-old son, Jamie, is also drawn to Kate’s eccentricity and her strange, glamorous old house full of books and music and history. As both father and son set about their parallel courtships, Tessa Hadley’s intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, revealing how each generation replays the stories of the one that came before, in new and sometimes startling patterns.
First published in hardcover: July 2007. Paperback: April 2008.
"This dreamy and thoughtful third novel from Hadley chronicles the slow-burning midlife crisis of Kate Flynn." - Publishers Weekly.
"A lovely, subtly teasing writer…Hadley’s observations of the ebb and flow of female desire and frustration are reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, but she taps sensual undercurrents where Woolf wouldn’t have dipped her toe." - The New York Times Book Review.
"Hadley has a knack for portraying the dysfunctional, often stagnant lives of the infuriatingly repressed." - Alexis Burling, The Washington Post.
"Hadley deserves praise for setting her novel in Cardiff, because despite Mrs Gaskell's efforts, fiction remains centred on the metropolis. I'd love to be able to hail this as being as engaging as the kind of rich, dense provincial novels being written by Kate Atkinson, Pat Ferguson and Helen Dunmore. Hadley doesn't probe deeply or widely enough for that to be the case, but there is every hope that one day, she will." - The Independent (UK).
This information about The Master Bedroom was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Mark Vessey
Tessa Hadley is the author of three previous collections of stories and eight novels. She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and has been a finalist for the Story Prize. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She lives in Cardiff, Wales.
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