Reading List

Authors Like Tessa Hadley

Q: What should I read after The Past?

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart for a house seen through a young woman’s eyes, and Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant for grown-up siblings and the family they share.

Q: Does Tessa Hadley have a new book?

Her most recent book is The Party (2024), a short novel about two sisters in post-war Bristol. She has continued to publish stories in The New Yorker, but no new book had been announced at the time of writing.

Q: Which Tessa Hadley book should I read first?

The Past (2015), which won the Hawthornden Prize, is a good place to start. For something shorter, try The Party (2024) or one of her story collections, such as Bad Dreams (2017).

Tessa Hadley was born in Bristol in 1956 and published her first novel, Accidents in the Home, in 2002, at the age of forty-six. Since then she has written nine novels and four collections of stories, many of them first printed in The New Yorker. In The Past (2015) four grown-up siblings spend a summer in their grandparents’ old house in the country, deciding whether to sell it. In Free Love (2022) a suburban wife in 1967 leaves her husband and children for a much younger man. In The Party (2024) two sisters go to a party at a dockside pub in a still bomb-damaged Bristol. In 2016 she won both the Hawthornden Prize and a Windham-Campbell Prize. The ten writers below share her material — houses, marriages, sisters, a single afternoon — and her conviction that a small domestic scene can hold a whole life.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Family · Short stories · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Tessa Hadley, start with Elizabeth Bowen, whose novels of the 1930s and 1940s give the same weight to rooms, weather and a girl’s first glimpse of adult secrets. Elizabeth Taylor wrote English domestic life with the same cool, exact eye, and Alice Munro showed how a short story can cover decades. Further down: an Irish writer who does it in under a hundred pages, and a writer who throws out the furniture of the realist novel altogether.

10 authors like Tessa Hadley

Houses full of secrets

Elizabeth Bowen

Anglo-Irish · The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1948)

Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, inherited the family house in County Cork, Bowen’s Court, and died in 1973. The Death of the Heart follows a sixteen-year-old orphan, Portia, sent to live with her half-brother and his wife in a smart Regent’s Park house, whose diary records everything the adults would prefer not to see. The Heat of the Day is set in London during the Blitz.

The forerunner for Hadley’s way of writing a house as if it were a character, and a young woman as the person in the room who notices most. Bowen’s sentences are more knotted and mannered; Hadley’s are plainer, but the attention to light, furniture and what goes unsaid is the same.

— Lisanne

The English domestic novel

Elizabeth Taylor

British · A View of the Harbour (1947), Angel (1957), Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)

Taylor (1912–1975) was born in Reading and spent most of her adult life in a Buckinghamshire village. She wrote twelve novels in her lifetime and published more than thirty stories in The New Yorker between 1948 and 1969. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, about a widow living out her days in a London hotel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1971.

The closest English relation to Hadley: marriages, friendships and small betrayals in ordinary houses, observed with irony that never turns into contempt. Both were regulars in The New Yorker, and both are better on the inner lives of women at home than almost anyone else of their generation.

— Lisanne

A late start, a light touch

Penelope Fitzgerald

British · The Bookshop (1978), Offshore (1979), The Blue Flower (1995)

Fitzgerald (1916–2000) published her first book at fifty-eight and her first novel at sixty. Offshore, drawn from the years she lived on a leaking houseboat on the Thames, won the Booker Prize in 1979. The Blue Flower, about the young German poet Novalis and the twelve-year-old girl he wanted to marry, is often called her masterpiece.

Like Hadley, Fitzgerald began late and wrote short, precise novels in which a great deal happens between the lines. Fitzgerald is drier and more elliptical, and moves further in time and place, but both trust the reader to notice a turning point without being told.

— Lisanne

The quiet master of the story

William Trevor

Irish · Felicia’s Journey (1994), The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), Collected Stories (1992)

Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, settled in Devon and died in 2016. He wrote more than a dozen novels and many collections of short stories, often about lonely, overlooked people in Irish and English towns. Felicia’s Journey won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1994.

Trevor writes the same kind of short story as Hadley: a few ordinary people, one afternoon or one season, and a slow realisation that changes how they see their lives. He is darker and more interested in cruelty; she is warmer about desire. Read them side by side to see how much a single page can carry.

— Lisanne

Every book by William Trevor →

Decades in one story

Alice Munro

Canadian · Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Runaway (2004), Dear Life (2012)

Munro (1931–2024) wrote short stories almost exclusively, most of them set in small towns in south-western Ontario, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her stories often jump across years, so that a girl in the first pages is an old woman by the last. In July 2024, after her death, her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner wrote that she had been sexually abused as a child by Munro’s second husband and that Munro stayed with him after learning of it.

The writer most often named beside Hadley, for the way both let a story cover a whole life by moving freely through time. Munro’s world is rural Canada and Hadley’s is England and Wales, but both write women who look back at a choice and see it differently. Readers will weigh the work against what is now known about her family.

— Lisanne

The New Yorker stylist

Mavis Gallant

Canadian · From the Fifteenth District (1979), Home Truths (1981), Paris Stories (2002)

Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922, moved to Paris in the early 1950s and lived there until her death in 2014. She published 116 stories in The New Yorker, about expatriates, families and the long after-effects of the Second World War in Europe.

Gallant shares Hadley’s sharp eye for class, clothes and the small humiliations of family life, and her habit of leaving a story without resolving it. She is more ironic and more European in scope; Hadley stays closer to home and to the body.

— Lisanne

Families, over a lifetime

Anne Tyler

American · Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), Breathing Lessons (1988), A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 and has set most of her novels in Baltimore. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant follows three siblings and the mother who raised them alone; Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989. A Spool of Blue Thread covers three generations of one family and the house they cannot let go of.

If you liked the siblings and the family house in The Past, Tyler writes that story again and again, with more comedy. Hadley is more sensual and more interested in desire; Tyler is gentler, but both see a family as a set of private versions of the same events.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anne Tyler →

Small towns, close up

Elizabeth Strout

American · Olive Kitteridge (2008), My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016)

Strout was born in Portland, Maine, in 1956 and sets much of her fiction in invented small towns in Maine. Olive Kitteridge, a novel in thirteen linked stories about a retired maths teacher and her neighbours, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009. My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about a writer visited in hospital by the mother she has barely seen in years.

Strout and Hadley are the same age and work the same seam: marriages, mothers and daughters, and the gap between what people feel and what they say. Strout’s linked stories are a good next step for readers who like Hadley’s collections as much as her novels.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Strout →

A family in under a hundred pages

Claire Keegan

Irish · Foster (2010), Small Things Like These (2021)

Keegan was born in County Wicklow in 1968 and is best known for two very short books. In Foster a girl is sent to spend a summer with relatives on a farm, where she is cared for in a way she has never been at home. Small Things Like These, about a coal merchant in 1985 who discovers what is happening in the local Magdalene laundry, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022.

Keegan compresses what Hadley expands. Both write a child or an adult slowly realising how a household really works, but Keegan does it in fewer than a hundred pages, with almost nothing explained. Read Foster after one of Hadley’s stories about childhood summers.

— Lisanne

Every book by Claire Keegan →

The novel without furniture

Rachel Cusk

British-Canadian · Aftermath (2012), Outline (2014), Parade (2024)

Cusk was born in Saskatoon, Canada, in 1967 and grew up partly in Los Angeles before moving to England. Her memoir of separation, Aftermath, was attacked for its candour. In the Outline trilogy (2014–2018) a writer called Faye listens while other people describe their marriages and families, and she herself barely appears.

The writer who most complicates Hadley’s method. Cusk has the same subject — marriage, divorce, children, the family home — but she has argued that the traditional realist novel no longer fits it, and strips out plot, description and character. Reading her after Hadley shows how much the old furniture still does, and what it hides.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rachel Cusk →

Where to start if you loved Tessa Hadley

If you loved The Past, read Elizabeth Bowen.

The Death of the Heart: a girl, a house and a family that would rather she noticed less.

If you want the English domestic novel at its best, read Elizabeth Taylor.

Start with A View of the Harbour, a seaside town after the war, seen house by house.

If you prefer Hadley’s stories, read Alice Munro or William Trevor.

Runaway or Trevor’s Collected Stories: whole lives in thirty pages.

If you want something very short, read Claire Keegan.

Foster is a summer on an Irish farm, and it can be read in an evening.

If you want to go back to Hadley herself, read Free Love or The Party.

Free Love (2022) is her fullest novel about desire; The Party (2024) is her most recent book and her shortest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Tessa Hadley

Who writes like Tessa Hadley?

Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor wrote the same kind of English domestic novel before her; Alice Munro, William Trevor and Mavis Gallant wrote the same kind of short story. Among living writers, Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Strout and Claire Keegan share her subject of families and marriages seen from the inside.

What should I read after The Past?

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart for a house seen through a young woman’s eyes, and Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant for grown-up siblings and the family they share.

Is Tessa Hadley like Alice Munro?

In method, often: both let a story jump across years and both write women looking back at a choice. Munro’s stories are set mostly in rural Ontario, Hadley’s in England and Wales, and Hadley has also written nine novels.

Does Tessa Hadley have a new book?

Her most recent book is The Party (2024), a short novel about two sisters in post-war Bristol. She has continued to publish stories in The New Yorker, but no new book had been announced at the time of writing.

Which Tessa Hadley book should I read first?

The Past (2015), which won the Hawthornden Prize, is a good place to start. For something shorter, try The Party (2024) or one of her story collections, such as Bad Dreams (2017).

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Tessa Hadley

10 authors like Tessa Hadley

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Taylor

Penelope Fitzgerald

William Trevor

Alice Munro

Mavis Gallant

Anne Tyler

Elizabeth Strout

Claire Keegan

Rachel Cusk

Where to start if you loved Tessa Hadley

Frequently asked questions about authors like Tessa Hadley

Who writes like Tessa Hadley?

What should I read after The Past?

Is Tessa Hadley like Alice Munro?

Does Tessa Hadley have a new book?

Which Tessa Hadley book should I read first?

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