The Master Bedroom

Novel set in present-day England, in which a father and son fall in love with the same woman.

The New York Times - Liesl Schillinger

Tessa Hadley is a lovely, subtly teasing writer, studiedly evasive in her treatment of emotions and eerily precise in her sketches of everyday people in upper-middle-class British settings. Who her characters are, and what they want, is so deeply concealed (even from themselves) that they could be nude and lose none of their mystery…In The Master Bedroom, no relationship is as solid as it might seem, no course of action necessarily makes sense, and motivations are buried. Yet Hadley's favorite theme emerges clearly: the heart has no logic, the brain cannot always keep it in rein and nature controls human behavior—not the other way around. The novel is a chess game of slow-burn erotic maneuvers that produce tantalizingly unpredictable outcomes.

Tessa Hadley teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. She is the author of two novels, Everything Will Be All Right and Accidents in the Home, both available from Picador. Accidents in the Home was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker. She lives in Cardiff, Wales.