Customer Reviews

Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel

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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!

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.

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.

Tessa Hadley turns out an evocative, clever romp of a novel... this book had me eager to keep turning pages. Everything Will Be All Right is interesting, exciting, and thought-provoking.

I could really relate to Hadley's characters. I felt totally like I could relate to them, could feel their struggles and emotions.

I recommend this book highly-- pick it up today if you want a fun, fast, exciting read!

After reading 100 pages and being bored to tears, I glanced through this book and found that it continued in the same dull vein. The events in this book HAD to be interesting, but they were overloaded with such detail and lack of feeling that they became excruciatingly dull. The characters were not developed so that I cared about any of them. I waited and waited for something to engage me with some personal or dramatic effect but the novel just runs on without pause to another non-involving encounter with ever-newer characters. Forget about it.