EBWith its longlist for the Orange Prize, I know that Tessa Hadley’s The London Train, which we’ll be publishing on May 24, has jumped to the top of many TBR lists. We just got our first two reviews, and I think they’ll secure that place:
From Booklist:
In what seems at first a bifurcated novel, both protagonists take the London train. Paul, a writer with two small daughters in his second marriage, travels from his home in Wales to London to find his pregnant 20-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Poised on the brink of freedom, he temporarily leaves his new family behind. Cora, an English teacher who traveled from her London flat to Cardiff to remodel her late parents’ home, in which she now lives, is poised to divorce her senior civil servant husband, who’s embroiled in an increasingly volatile investigation. Years before, Paul’s and Cora’s lives intersected when they met on the London train. In spare, incisive prose, Hadley (The Master Bedroom, 2008) probes this pair of only children marked by the deaths of their mothers, playing with chronology to lay open the pasts that shaped them. This is a keenly perceptive and wise novel, illustrating that however important the past is in our lives, only the present, glimpsed in the final pages, truly matters.
And from Three Guys One Book:
How do you understand what Tessa Hadley has done in this complexly detailed novel, whose plot lines, like branch lines, lead to yet more stories? I’m a fan of the minor scene that tells you who the writer is. In The London Train, it’s Cora in a taxi, tracking down an ancient girlfriend of her husband’s. The taxi driver starts a conversation about his family, something about tensions between a daughter-in-law and other family members. It only takes a couple of lines but already you can sense Tessa Hadley warming up to tell you another absorbing tale about a family. The story is dropped. It’s just a taxi ride. But you sense that Tessa Hadley could have given you two hundred pages on the taxi driver’s family if she had wanted to. Because behind the stories that we’ve heard about, there are just other stories, and more stories still, just beyond our reach, like the stories of other passengers in a train car.
