Changes

Married Love is Tessa Hadley’s second collection, containing twelve short stories looking at (mostly) modern relationships and family dynamics – many are about parents and their grown -up children and in-laws, others are about couples. Flicking through the book to choose some of the best and/or most interesting stories to mention, I have found a difficulty. Almost all of these incisive, witty stories reveal an interesting group of characters I would like to know more about after the end, sometimes from several different viewpoints, and it is hard to pick out just a few.

In A Mouthful of Cut Glass, a couple take each other home to meet the parents, and come up against some of the differences between them they had hardly noticed before, particularly class. In ''In the Country '' the outsiders at a family gathering, both partners of grown -up children in the family, surreptitiously bond with each other.

The majority of these stories have contemporary settings – The Trojan Prince features a young man in the early 1920s. A Mouthful of Cut Glass takes place in 1972, and in fact , I initially overlooked the historical setting. Looking at it, there are various period references but the preoccupations of Hadley’s characters don’t change much over the years.

I especially liked the very 21st -century situation of Journey Home, in which Alec worries about his sister who changes her Facebook status to Single and won’t answer her phone while he is abroad.

Other excellent short story collections include [[Perfect Lives by Polly Samson]], [[The Unspoken Truth by Angelica Garnett]] and [[The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories by Shena Mackay]]