Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate is forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother at Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it’s because she’s bored and hasn’t got anything else to do, but she can’t stop.

Adapting to a new way of life, the connections Kate forges in her new home are to have painful consequences, as the past begins to cast its long shadow over the present…

‘Bewitching… A prose stylist of quite outstanding talent with a gift for psychological acuity and an ability to encapsulate the human condition’ Guardian

Publisher Review

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure -- Zadie Smith She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today -- Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie A luxuriant writer... the richness of her descriptions need only be matched by the imagination of the reader * Washington Times * Closely observed, beautifully written, generous, funny and true, Hadley's fiction is the real thing * Sunday Times * A sharp and a sexy read * Observer * Bewitching ...A prose stylist of quite outstanding talent with a gift for psychological acuity and an ability to encapsulate the human condition...As a writer, she is the real thing, utterly authentic in motive and achievement * Guardian * 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 * New York Times *