Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel [Hardcover]

Tessa Hadley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 6, 2003

The profoundly different choices of a mother and her daughter infuse this rich, expansive novel with both intimate detail and wide resonance

When Joyce Stevenson is thirteen, her family moves to the south of England to live with their aunt Vera. Joyce's mother, Lil, is a widow; Vera has a husband who keeps his suits in the wardrobe but spends evenings at another house nearby. While the two sisters couldn't be more different-Vera, a teacher, has unquestioning belief in the powers of education and reason; Lil puts her faith in séances-they work together to form a tight-knit family.

Joyce sees that there is something missing in their lives: men. She doesn't want to end up like her aunt Vera, rejected by her husband. Joyce discovers art at school: she falls in love with the Impressionists and, eventually, with one of her teachers. In spite of the temptations of the sixties, she is determined to make her marriage and motherhood a success. When Joyce's daughter, Zoe, grows up and has a baby of her own, however, she proves to be impatient with domestic life and chooses a dramatically different path.

Spanning five decades of extraordinary changes in women's lives, Everything Will Be All Right explores the complicated relationships of a family. The young ones of each generation are sure that they can correct the mistakes of their parents; the truth, of course, is more opaque. Intricate and insightful, Everything Will Be All Right firmly establishes Tessa Hadley among the great contemporary observers of the human mind and heart.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this complex, intelligent family epic, Hadley (Accidents in the Home) chronicles the lives of three generations of English women over four decades of social and political change. After her father is killed in WWII, 11-year-old Joyce and her mother, sister and brother go to live with Joyce's stern schoolteacher aunt and her aunt's family. Escaping from this cozy menagerie when she goes away to art college, Joyce, by now a striking, warmhearted redhead ("Men liked Joyce"), falls in love with her married professor, an intense painter who leaves his wife for her. Joyce adapts well to married life (like Mrs. Dalloway, she throws elaborate parties), but her marriage is less conventional than it seems. Her daughter Zoe, quieter and more self-contained, does well at school and goes away to Cambridge, where she studies history and embarks on a tormented relationship with clever, rigid Simon ("you know he never touched me-I mean, literally, even with his hand-except when he wanted to make love to me"). Against Simon's wishes, Zoe has his baby, but shortly after Pearl's birth Zoe leaves him, making a life for herself as a successful conflict expert and academic. Pearl, Zoe's rebellious daughter, has Joyce's red hair but is defiantly herself, reveling in disorder and roving with gangs of friends. The novel itself is an unruly domestic tangle of family members, lovers and friends, crowded and intimate. Cutting abruptly across decades and then zeroing in on a few months or years in the life of its endearingly human protagonists, it expertly captures the texture of daily existence and the struggle of three memorable women to make their way in the world.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School--Hadley's domestic novel introduces readers to several generations of women, each one at work to gain independence, sort through personal chaos, and watch the succeeding children mature. The setting is England from the end of World War II through the present; great-aunt Vera and her sister Lil, grandmother Joyce, mother Zoe, and teenage Pearl each gets a whirl at center stage. The robust details of their lives offer a sensual understanding not only of each woman's immediate world, but also of the changes she experiences as she matures. Like Marianne Fredriksson's Hannah's Daughters (Ballantine, 1998), this multigenerational story has strong characters that are easy to differentiate. They invite readers to ally their sympathies with specific women among the cast, making this an easy entrée for book-discussion groups. The male characters are more than simply foils for the women; they, too, offer a spectrum of approaches to life and self-realization. Overall, there's much here to appeal to those who are more interested in social insight than romance.--Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (October 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805070656
• ISBN-13: 978-0805070651
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,011,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the great writers of our time, December 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel (Hardcover)

Tessa Hadley is a truly great writer, of the Alice Munro/William Trevor tradition, but with a slightly more modern sensibility. It's too bad not more people seem to have heard of her (she has published a good number of excellent stories in the New Yorker) but my guess is that will change over time. If you like intelligent women's fiction, read this author!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling characterizations, February 13, 2005

By 

Myfanwy Collins "Myfanwy" (New England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel (Hardcover)

Tessa Hadley's Everything Will Be All Right is a lovely and compelling book. The narrative spans several decades in the lives of one family-and more specifically, in the lives of the women of the family. Three of the women in particular-Aunt Vera, the groundbreaking teacher; Joyce, the would-be artist; and Zoe, the brilliant scholar-lead us on the journey from post-WWII England to present. What we learn is that as the world around them changes at ever increasing speed, this family stays the same, particularly in their eventual acceptance of each other and in their gravitation to the the center--the women.

Hadley's writing is clear and often beautiful without being over the top, but the mastery of this novel is her ability to create and maintain characters. They simply live and breathe and stay in the room with the reader long after the book is finished. I was taken with this book from first word to last and would recommend it without reservation.

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous writing, insight. Don't want it to end., March 7, 2011

By 

Dorothy Terrell - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel (Paperback)

I first read a story by Tessa Hadley in The New Yorker, and was so struck by her
perfect descriptions of states of mind that I quickly ordered several more works by
her. The best, which startles me with its articulation of subtle emotional states and events -
the birth of a first child, for instances - Everything Will Be All Right -- is so compelling that
I don't want it to end.