Free Love: A Novel

Written by Tessa Hadley

Narrated by Abigail Thaw

“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).

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063137806

Tessa Hadley

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.

Reviews for Free Love

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting look at the 1960s in the UK, focusing on relationships and freedom. It didn't seem to have the depth I was hoping to find, but maybe that's a problem of my lack of perception

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In many ways, a strange story but beautifully rendered. Hadley draws you in and holds you there in a willing suspension of belief.

[bhowell_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

fabulous read

[perednia_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel of a 40-year-old homemaker and her family in 1967 feels at first like an homage to Mrs. Dalloway and Howards End. As the characters' lives unfold with the aftermath of an impromptu kiss after a disastrous dinner, there are notes of Wildean farce. Yet it all fits together as Hadley delves into the characters, what gives them joy, how politics and changing culture in Britain in the swinging 1960s both inspired and infuriated some.

[boredgames · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

just superb