> Skip to content
  • Published: 15 March 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099462002
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $22.99

Everything Will Be All Right




From the author of The Past, Tessa Hadley’s second novel now rejacketed for a whole new audience

Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way.

For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, and to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation. But her daughter Zoe, growing up, comes to see Joyce as a bourgeois housewife, and when Zoe has a baby of her own, she demands more from motherhood...

  • Published: 15 March 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099462002
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl and The Past, and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She lives in London and is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker and other magazines.

Also by Tessa Hadley

See all

Praise for Everything Will Be All Right

Bewitchingly compelling... Gloriously addictive, delectably enjoyable... the reader is snared and kept captive to the last... Exquisite

Guardian

Hadley's fiction resembles that of Anne Tyler in aiming to illuminate ordinary life

Sunday Times

Genuinely exciting

New Statesman

Seductively written

Sunday Telegraph

Engrossing... This book is marvellous - a paean to the quiet splendour of life

Time Out

Witty and warm... An astute and accomplished work

Daily Mail

Fine-tuned, lyrical, exact

Independent

This fine, thoughtful novel underlines Tessa Hadley's skill at tackling and reclaiming the saga

Times Literary Supplement

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure

Zadie Smith

She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie