bad dreams and other stories essay

That’s More Like It: Tessa Hadley’s “Bad Dreams and Other Stories”

By claire jarvis july 1, 2017.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

[Daniel] wanted to say that revolution was a kind of cleansing that conferred its own immortality in a perpetual present. Art had to be revolutionary or it would die in time. He believed as he spoke that he was brilliantly eloquent, but in truth he was rambling incoherently. Paddy, getting the gist of it, quoted poetry in an ironic voice: — ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.’ — Signor Keats, I do believe, Nigel said. — Oh, that’s the poet, Jane said. — We have his bust at home, on the piano.

Of course, the words weren’t actually in front of her eyes, and parts of what was written were elusive when she sought them; certain sentences, though, were scored into her awareness as sharply as if she’d heard them read aloud […] The litany of [character] deaths tore jaggedly into the tissue that the book had woven, making everything lopsided and hideous. The epilogue’s gloating bland language, complacently regretful, seemed to relish catching her out in her dismay.

Claire Jarvis is an assistant professor at Stanford University. Her first book, Exquisite Masochism: Marriage, Sex, and the Novel Form , is out now from the Johns Hopkins University Press.

LARB Contributor

LARB Staff Recommendations

Patient atavism.

Throughout Tessa Hadley's "The Past," there remains a seemingly impassable distance between the world of women and the world of men.

Claire Jarvis Mar 1, 2016

Playing with Time: A Conversation with Tessa Hadley

Jane Gayduk interviews Tessa Hadley about her life and writing.

Jane Gayduk Feb 6, 2016

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English Tutor Lessons

English tuition year 12, bad dreams and other stories by tessa hadley: the basics, this resource is for year 12 students studying tessa hadley’s ‘bad dreams and other stories’ in the vce victorian curriculum for 2024 unit 3 aos1 reading and responding to texts..

Introduction

Tessa Hadley is a British writer of 6 novels and 2 short story collections.  Her 10 narratives in ‘Bad Dreams and Other Stories’ are realist in style and set in England between the early 20 th century and the present day.  They typically examine the experiences of women, often in terms of the psychological ramifications of family relationships, sexual encounters, or seemingly innocuous events.  The stories turn things upside down into new thresholds that are crossed, pushing character’s feelings of safety into another new perspective on the problem.

Transformation

Many stories deal with transformation and the need for her characters to process new experiences with sometimes seismic shifts of understanding and memory that can occur in a lifetime.  The reader asks if the retelling of the event or relationship helps to clarify how one feels, or does it layer one’s experiences with a new perspective, recasting the memory, changing the plots points?

Experiences

The stories speak deeply to the experience of change and loss and misery dealt to women who care for themselves, for other people, or for abstract principles like love or justice.  While some situations might be considered ‘everyday’ these experiences are shown to be significantly formative, shaping identities or facilitating transitions from innocence to experience. While gaining experience can be revelatory, it can also be fraught with danger and in some stories the characters are punished for their desire to have that particular experience.

What is important is the uncovering of secrets in the revelatory experiences. When secrets are revealed their impact can be shocking as well as enlightening.

All Resources created by englishtutorlessons.com.au Online Tutoring using Zoom for Mainstream English Students in the Victorian Curriculum

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By Tessa Hadley

A child woke up in the dark. She seemed to swim up into consciousness as if to a surface, which she then broke through, looking around with her eyes open. At first, the darkness was implacable. She might have arrived anywhere: all that was certain was her own self, lying on her side, her salty smell and her warmth, her knees pulled up to her skinny chest inside the cocoon of her brushed-nylon nightdress. But as she stared into the darkness familiar forms began to loom through it: the pale outline of a window, printed by the street lamp against the curtains; the horizontals on the opposite wall, which were the shelves where she and her brother kept their books and toys. Beside the window she could make out a rectangle of wool cloth tacked up; her mother had appliquéd onto it a sleigh and two horses and a driver cracking his whip, first gluing on the pieces and then outlining them with machine stitching—star shapes in blue thread for the falling snowflakes, lines of red stitching for the reins and the twisting whip. The child knew all these details by heart, though she couldn’t see them in the dark. She was where she always was when she woke up: in her own bedroom, in the top bunk, her younger brother asleep in the lower one.

Her mother and father were in bed and asleep, too. The basement flat was small enough that, if they were awake, she would have heard the sewing machine or the wireless, or her father practicing the trumpet or playing jazz records. She struggled to sit up out of the tightly wound nest of sheets and blankets; she was asthmatic and feared not being able to catch her breath. Cold night air struck her shoulders. It was strange to stare into the room with wide-open eyes and feel the darkness yielding only the smallest bit, as if it were pressing back against her efforts to penetrate it. Something had happened, she was sure, while she was asleep. She didn’t know what it was at first, but the strong dread it had left behind didn’t subside with the confusion of waking. Then she remembered that this thing had happened inside her sleep, in her dream. She had dreamed something horrible, and so plausible that it was vividly present as soon as she remembered it.

She had dreamed that she was reading her favorite book, the one she read over and over and actually had been reading earlier that night, until her mother came to turn off the light. In fact, she could feel the book’s hard corner pressing into her leg now through the blankets. In the dream, she had been turning its pages as usual when, beyond the story’s familiar last words, she discovered an extra section that she had never seen before, a short paragraph set on a page by itself, headed “Epilogue.” She was an advanced reader for nine and knew about prologues and epilogues—though it didn’t occur to her then that she was the author of her own dreams and must have invented this epilogue herself. It seemed so completely a found thing, alien and unanticipated, coming from outside herself, against her will.

In the real book she loved, “Swallows and Amazons,” six children spent their summers in perfect freedom, sailing dinghies on a lake, absorbed in adventures and rivalries that were half invented games and half truth, pushing across the threshold of safety into a thrilling unknown. All the details in the book had the solidity of life, though it wasn’t her own life—she didn’t have servants or boats or a lake or an absent father in the Navy. She had read all the other books in the series, too, and she acted out their stories with her friends at school, although they lived in a city and none of them had ever been sailing. The world of “Swallows and Amazons” existed in a dimension parallel to their own, touching it only in their games. They had a “Swallows and Amazons” club, and took turns bringing in “grub” to eat, “grog” and “pemmican”; they sewed badges, and wrote notes in secret code. All of them wanted to be Nancy Blackett, the strutting pirate girl, though they would settle for Titty Walker, sensitive and watchful.

Now the child seemed to see the impersonal print of the dream epilogue, written on the darkness in front of her eyes. John and Roger both went on to, it began, in a businesslike voice. Of course, the words weren’t actually in front of her eyes, and parts of what was written were elusive when she sought them; certain sentences, though, were scored into her awareness as sharply as if she’d heard them read aloud. Roger drowned at sea in his twenties. Roger was the youngest of them all, the ship’s boy, in whom she had only ever been mildly interested: this threw him into a terrible new prominence. John suffered with a bad heart. The Blackett sisters . . . long illnesses. Titty, killed in an unfortunate accident. The litany of deaths tore jaggedly into the tissue that the book had woven, making everything lopsided and hideous. The epilogue’s gloating bland language, complacently regretful, seemed to relish catching her out in her dismay. Oh, didn’t you know? Susan lived to a ripe old age . Susan was the dullest of the Swallows, tame and sensible, in charge of cooking and housekeeping. Still, the idea of her “ripe old age” was full of horror: wasn’t she just a girl, with everything ahead of her?

The child knew that the epilogue existed only in her dream, but she couldn’t dispel the taint of it, clinging to her thoughts. When she was younger, she had called to her mother if she woke in the night, but something stopped her from calling out now: she didn’t want to tell anyone about her dream. Once the words were said aloud, she would never be rid of them; it was better to keep them hidden. And she was afraid, anyway, that her mother wouldn’t understand the awfulness of the dream if she tried to explain it: she might laugh or think it was silly. For the first time, the child felt as if she were alone in her own home—its rooms spread out about her, invisible in the night, seemed unlike their usual selves. The book touching her leg through the blankets frightened her, and she thought she might never be able to open it again. Not wanting to lie down in the place where she’d had the dream, she swung over the side rail of the bed and reached with her bare feet for the steps of the ladder—the lower bunk was a cave so dark that she couldn’t make out the shape of her sleeping brother. Then she felt the carpet’s gritty wool under her toes.

The children’s bedroom, the bathroom, papered in big blue roses, and their parents’ room were all at the front of the massive Victorian house, which was four stories tall, including this basement flat; sometimes the child was aware of the other flats above theirs, full of the furniture of other lives, pressing down on their heads. Quietly she opened her bedroom door. The doors to the kitchen and the lounge, which were at the back of the flat, stood open onto the windowless hallway; a thin blue light, falling through them, lay in rectangles on the hall carpet. She had read about moonlight, but had never taken in its reality before: it made the lampshade of Spanish wrought iron, which had always hung from a chain in the hallway, seem suddenly as barbaric as a cage or a portcullis in a castle.

Everything was tidy in the kitchen: the dishcloth had been wrung out and hung on the edge of the plastic washing-up bowl; something on a plate was wrapped in greaseproof paper; the sewing machine was put away under its cover at one end of the table. The pieces of Liberty lawn print, which her mother was cutting out for one of her ladies, were folded carefully in their paper bag to keep them clean. Liberty lawn: her mother named it reverently, like an incantation—though the daily business of her sewing wasn’t reverent but briskly pragmatic, cutting and pinning and snipping at seams with pinking shears, running the machine with her head bent close to the work in bursts of concentration, one hand always raised to the wheel to slow it, or breaking threads quickly in the little clip behind the needle. The chatter of the sewing machine, racing and easing and halting and starting up again, was like a busy engine driving their days. There were always threads and pins scattered on the floor around where her mother was working—you had to be careful where you stepped.

In the lounge, the child paddled her toes in the hair of the white goatskin rug. Gleaming, uncanny, half reverted to its animal past, the rug yearned to the moon, which was balanced on top of the wall at the back of the paved yard. The silver frame of her parents’ wedding photograph and the yellow brass of her father’s trumpet—in its case with the lid open, beside the music stand—shone with the same pale light. Lifting the heavy lid of the gramophone, she breathed in the forbidden smell of the records nestled in their felt-lined compartments, then touched the pages heaped on her father’s desk: his meaning, densely tangled in his black italic writing, seemed more accessible through her fingertips in the dark than it ever was in daylight, when its difficulty thwarted her. He was studying for his degree in the evenings, after teaching at school all day. She and her brother played quietly so as not to disturb him; their mother had impressed upon them the importance of his work. He was writing about a book, “Leviathan”: his ink bottle had left imprints on the desk’s leather inlay, and he stored his notes on a shelf in cardboard folders, carefully labelled—the pile of folders growing ever higher. The child was struck by the melancholy of this accumulation: sometimes she felt a pang of fear for her father, as if he were exposed and vulnerable—and yet when he wasn’t working he charmed her with his jokes, pretending to be poisoned when he tasted the cakes she had made, teasing her school friends until they blushed. She never feared in the same way for her mother: her mother was capable; she was the whole world.

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In their absence, her parents were more distinctly present to her than usual, as individuals with their own unfathomable adult preoccupations. She was aware of their lives running backward from this moment, into a past that she could never enter. This moment, too, the one fitted around her now as inevitably and closely as a skin, would one day become the past: its details then would seem remarkable and poignant, and she would never be able to return inside them. The chairs in the lounge, formidable in the dimness, seemed drawn up as if for a spectacle, waiting more attentively than if they were filled with people: the angular recliner built of black tubular steel, with lozenges of polished wood for arms; the cone-shaped wicker basket in its round wrought-iron frame; the black-painted wooden armchair with orange cushions; and the low divan covered in striped olive-green cotton. The reality of the things in the room seemed more substantial to the child than she was herself—and she wanted in a sudden passion to break something, to disrupt this world of her home, sealed in its mysterious stillness, where her bare feet made no sound on the lino or the carpets.

On impulse, using all her strength, she pushed at the recliner from behind, tipping it over slowly until it was upside down, with its top resting on the carpet and its legs in the air, the rubber ferrules on its feet unexpectedly silly in the moonlight, like prim, tiny shoes. Then she tipped over the painted chair, so that its cushions flopped out. She pulled the wicker cone out of its frame and turned the frame over, flipped up the goatskin rug. She managed to make very little noise, just a few soft bumps and thuds; when she had finished, though, the room looked as if a hurricane had blown through it, throwing the chairs about. She was shocked by what she’d effected, but gratified, too: the after-sensation of strenuous work tingled in her legs and arms, and she was breathing fast; her whole body rejoiced in the chaos. Perhaps it would be funny when her parents saw it in the morning. At any rate, nothing— nothing —would ever make her tell them that she’d done it. They would never know, and that was funny, too. A private hilarity bubbled up in her, though she wouldn’t give way to it; she didn’t want to make a sound. At that very moment, as she surveyed her crazy handiwork, the moon sank below the top of the wall outside and the room darkened, all its solidity withdrawn.

The child’s mother woke up early, in the dawn. Had her little boy called out to her? He sometimes woke in the night and had strange fits of crying, during which he didn’t recognize her and screamed in her arms for his mummy. She listened, but heard nothing—yet she was as fully, promptly awake as if there had been some summons or a bell had rung. Carefully she sat up, not wanting to wake her sleeping husband, who was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up and his back to her, the bristle of his crew cut the only part of him visible above the blankets. The room was just as she had left it when she went to sleep, except that his clothes were thrown on top of hers on the chair; he had stayed up late, working on his essay. She remembered dimly that when he got into bed she had turned over, snuggling up to him, and that in her dream she had seemed to fit against the shape of him as sweetly as a nut into its shell, losing herself inside him. But now he was lost, somewhere she couldn’t follow him. Sometimes in the mornings, especially if they hadn’t made love the night before, she would wake to find herself beside this stranger, buried away from her miles deep, frowning in his sleep. His immobility then seemed a kind of comment, or a punishment, directed at her.

The gray light in the room was diffuse and hesitant. Even on sunny days, these rooms at the front of the flat weren’t bright. She had been happy in this flat at first, in the new freedom of her married life, but now she resented the neighbors always brooding overhead and was impatient to move to a place they could have all to themselves. But that would have to wait until he finished his degree. She eased out from under the warmth of the blankets. Now that she was thoroughly awake she needed to pee before she tried to sleep again. As she got out of bed, her reflection stood up indefatigably to meet her in the gilt-framed mirror that was one of her junk-shop finds, mounted in an alcove beside the window, with a trailing philodendron trained around it. The phantom in the baby-doll nightdress was enough like Monica Vitti (everyone said she looked like Monica Vitti) to make her straighten her back in self-respect; and she was aware of yesterday’s L’Air du Temps in the sleepy heat of her skin.

In the hall, she listened at the door of the children’s room, which stood ajar—nothing. The lavatory was chilly: its tiny high window made it feel like a prison cell, but a blackbird sang liquidly outside in the yard. On the way back to bed, she looked into the kitchen, where everything was as she’d left it—he hadn’t even made his cocoa or eaten the sandwich she’d put out for him, before he came to bed. His refraining made her tense her jaw, as if he had repudiated her and preferred his work. She should have been a painter, she thought in a flash of anger, not a housewife and a dressmaker. But at art college she’d been overawed by the fine-arts students, who were mostly experienced grown men, newly returned from doing their national service in India and Malaya. Still, her orderly kitchen reassured her: the scene of her daily activity, poised and quiescent now, awaiting the morning, when she’d pick it up again with renewed energy. Perhaps he’d like bacon for his breakfast—she had saved up her housekeeping to buy him some. His mother had cooked bacon for him every morning.

When she glanced into the lounge, her shock at the sight of the chairs thrown about was as extreme as a hand clapped over her mouth from behind. The violence was worse because it was frozen in silence—had lain in wait, gloating, while she suspected nothing. Someone had broken in. She was too afraid in the first moments to call out to her husband. She waited in the doorway, holding her breath, for the movement that would give the intruder away; it was awful to think that a few minutes ago she had gone unprotected all the way down the lonely passageway to the lavatory. Then, as her panic subsided, she took in the odd specificity of the chaos. Only the chairs were overturned, at the center of the room; nothing else had been touched, nothing pulled off the shelves and thrown on the floor, nothing smashed. The lounge windows were tightly closed—just as the back door had surely been closed in the kitchen. Nothing had been taken. Had it? The wireless was intact on its shelf. Rousing out of her stupor, she crossed to the desk and opened the drawer where her husband kept his band earnings. The money was safe: three pound ten in notes and some loose change, along with his pipe and pipe cleaners and dirty tobacco pouch, the smell of which stayed on her fingers when she closed the drawer.

Instead of waking her husband, she tried the window catches, then went around checking the other rooms of the flat. The kitchen door and the front door were both securely bolted, and no one could have climbed in through the tiny window in the lavatory. Soundless on her bare feet, she entered the children’s bedroom and stood listening to their breathing. Her little boy stirred in his sleep but didn’t cry; her daughter was spread-eagled awkwardly amid the menagerie of her stuffed toys and dolls. Their window, too, was fastened shut. There was no intruder in the flat, and only one explanation for the crazy scene in the front room: her imagination danced with affront and dismay. Chilled, she returned to stand staring in the lounge. Her husband was moody, and she’d always known that he had anger buried in him. But he’d never done anything like this before—nothing so naked and outrageous. She supposed he must have got frustrated with his studies before he came to bed. Or was the disorder a derisory message meant for her, because he despised her homemaking, her domestication of the free life he’d once had? Perhaps the mess was even supposed to be some kind of brutal joke. She couldn’t imagine how she had slept through the outburst.

This time, for once, she was clearly in the right, wasn’t she? He had been childish, giving way to his frustration—as if she didn’t feel fed up sometimes. And he criticized her for her bad temper! He had such high standards for everyone else! From now on, she would hold on to this new insight into him, no matter how reasonable he seemed. Her disdain hurt her, like a bruise to the chest; she was more used to admiring him. But it was also exhilarating: she seemed to see the future with great clarity, looking forward through a long tunnel of antagonism, in which her husband was her enemy. This awful truth appeared to be something she had always known, though in the past it had been clouded in uncertainty and now she saw it starkly. Calmly and quietly she picked up each chair, put back the cushions, which had tumbled onto the carpet, straightened the goatskin rug. The room looked as serene as if nothing had ever happened in it. The joke of its serenity erupted inside her like bubbles of soundless laughter. Nothing— nothing —would ever make her acknowledge what he’d done, or the message he’d left for her, although when he saw the room restored to its rightful order, he would know that she knew. She would wait for him to be the first to acknowledge in words the passage of this silent violence between them.

In the bedroom, she lay down beside her husband with her back turned; her awareness of her situation seemed pure and brilliant, and she expected to lie awake, burning at his nearness. There was less than an hour to wait before she had to get up again; she’d got back into bed only because her feet were cold and it was too early to switch on the electric fire in the kitchen. But almost at once she dropped into a deep sleep—particularly blissful, as if she were falling down through syrupy darkness, her limbs unbound and bathing in warmth. When she woke again—this time her little boy really was calling out to her—she remembered immediately what had happened in the night, but she also felt refreshed and blessed.

A young wife fried bacon for her husband: the smell of it filled the flat. Her son was eating cereal at the table. Her husband was preoccupied, packing exercise books into his worn briefcase, opening the drawer in his desk where he kept his pipe and tobacco, dropping these into the pocket of his tweed jacket. But he came at some point to stand behind his wife at the stove and put his arms around her, nuzzling her neck, kissing her behind her ear, and she leaned back into his kiss, as she always did, tilting her head to give herself to him.

When the bacon was ready, she served it up on a plate with fried bread and a tomato and poured his tea, then went to find out why their daughter was dawdling in the bedroom. The girl was sitting on the edge of her brother’s bunk, trying to pull on her knee-length socks with one hand while she held a book open in front of her eyes with the other. Her thin freckled face was nothing like her mother’s. One white sock was twisted around her leg with its dirty heel sticking out at the front, and the book was surely the same one she had already read several times. The child was insistent, though, that she needed to start reading it all over again, from the beginning. Her mother took the book away and chivvied her along. ♦

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By Kyle Chayka

By Anthony Lane

By Justin Taylor

By Clarissa Wei

‘Bad Dreams’ Finds Magic in the Everyday Lives of Women

The best stories deal with younger girls, and while they aren’t quite coming-of-age tales, they certainly explore youth and innocence in a complex way. In the opening story, “The Abduction,” a young girl willingly gets into a car with three older boys. What transpires after is hardly exciting, but Hadley writes with such clarity and confidence that even joining our narrator as she watches someone clean debris from a pool becomes extraordinary. The first truly interesting thing in this young girl’s life is brought to life with such precise prose: “Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed.”

In the title story “Bad Dreams,” a little girl wakes from a nightmare about her favorite book. Never having been awake at such a quiet hour, she roams the house and decides to move all the furniture in the sitting room, subsequently displacing a larger part of her family in the process. The end of the story switches to the mother’s point of view in a very clever and mysterious narrative structure where the reader knows more than the characters and thus feels powerful. Hadley’s writing somehow captures both the innocence of childhood and the heightened maturity of observations that only seem important in the dead of night.

The collection often pulls magic from the mundane, especially in “Experience.” A young wife, house-sitting while she finds a way to bounce back after her failed marriage, reads the diaries of another woman’s life. In a fairytale turn of events, the man in the diaries turns up at her doorstep and our narrator must either embrace or fight against what she feels is a life unlived. Hadley finds a way to insert phrases such as, “But liking people and even loving them seemed to me now like ways of keeping yourself safe, and I didn’t want to be safe.”

A few stories are less memorable, such as “Deeds Not Words,” where an all-girls school deals with the women’s suffrage movement tangentially through a character who is preoccupied with her own love affair — full of potential but not executed to fruition. And though I enjoyed “One Saturday Morning” for its childlike perspective, the front half, full of self-contained observations, didn’t engage me; the shocker came twelve pages too late.

Perhaps the only weak point in the collection are the stories’ final pages — sometimes abrupt, sometimes trying too hard for ambiguity. Though I suppose, in keeping with the collection on a thematic level, this could be a reflection of the banality and mystery of modern life.

As a collection, the everyday lives of these girls and women become exceptional when told through Hadley’s intricate and perceptive prose. The pace is often leisurely — sometimes a little too leisurely — but it’s obvious Tessa Hadley has the restraint and mastery of a great writer, and there is beauty and insight in all 10 tales.

A Brutal History Reimagined in “You Dreamed of Empires”

FICTION – SHORT STORIES Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley Harper Published May 16, 2017 ISBN 9780062476661

Tessa Hadley is the award-winning author of six critically acclaimed novels. She has been long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and is also the author of two previous short story collections, both of which were New York Times Notable Books. She lives in London.

Are you passionate about diverse voices and genres in literature? Do you wish small, independent, and university presses got just as much attention as the Big Five publishers? You can help the Chicago Review of Books and Arcturus make the literary world more inclusive by becoming a member, patron, or sponsor. Each option comes with its own perks and exclusive content. Click here to learn more.

Sara is a writer living and teaching in Chicago. Originally from Texas, Sara relocated to the windy city where she earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College. She is the Director of Signature Programs for the writing center StoryStudio Chicago, the Editor-in-Chief of Arcturus magazine, and an Editor-at-Large for the Chicago Review of Books and the Southern Review of Books. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. You can follow her on twitter and Instagram @sncutaia

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Bad Dreams and Other Stories Summary and Reviews

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Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

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Published May 2017 240 pages Genre: Short Stories Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

The award-winning author of The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" (Washington Post), in a collection of stories that elevate the mundane into the exceptional.

The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proven herself to be the champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories it's the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists. A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams. Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Tessa Hadley "puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master" (Lily King, author of Euphoria ).

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"Starred Review. Achingly lovely, though never sentimental, Hadley's collection renders common lives with exquisite grace." - Kirkus "Starred Review. In subtly insightful and observant prose, Hadley writes brilliantly of the words and gestures that pass unnoticed "in the intensity of present" but echo without cease." - Publishers Weekly "It is impossible to overstate how much I admire the work of Tessa Hadley; her mastery of the smallest gestures on the page is breathtaking and her ability to weave a symphonic whole time after time thrilling. Every story in this collection is beautiful, precise, expansive, and a joy." - Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest

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Tessa Hadley Author Biography

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Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past , as well as three short story collections, most recently Bad Dreams and Other Stories , which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker ; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.

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In 'bad dreams,' tessa hadley serves up satisfying short stories.

Heller McAlpin

Bad Dreams and Other Stories

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This spring brings a bumper crop of short story collections, some introducing distinctive new writers, others strategically timed to tide us over the wait between an established author's novels. I've been enjoying a stack of these books, most notably by Haruki Murakami, Joshua Ferris, Penelope Lively, and Tessa Hadley. They're all worthwhile, but if pressed to recommend just one, it would be Hadley's Bad Dreams. Her meticulously observed, extraordinarily perceptive stories are as satisfying as Alice Munro's. Yes, Hadley is that good.

I'm well aware that even in a culture that packages snacks in 100-calorie packs and messages in 140-character Tweets, short stories can still be a hard sell, despite their bite-size convenience. Readers complain about the effort of climbing into each new story, only to be abruptly turned out just when they've settled in.

Let me reassure you that the ten tales in Hadley's book – seven of which were first published in The New Yorker — are instantly immersive, with opening lines like this: "When my marriage fell apart one summer, I had to get out of the little flat in Kentish Town, where I had been first happy and then sad." Unlike many short story writers, who serve up slices of life cut so thin you're left craving more, Hadley offers both rich complexity and satisfying closure — so you never feel as if you've been precipitously evicted.

While Hadley's six novels, including The London Train and The Past, afford more room for ingenious structural inventiveness, her stories often span as many years as her longer-form work. She's especially drawn to instantly regretted moments of lost innocence, or subtly life-altering experiences that her characters only come to understand decades later — if at all.

In the title story, which concerns the power of both words and silence, an avid 9-year-old reader decides not to share a dream that has awakened her – a distressing epilogue to a favorite book – because "Once the words were said aloud, she would never be rid of them; it was better to keep them hidden." She distracts herself with an innocent nocturnal prank, which, unknown to her, her mother erroneously attributes to an act of spite by her husband – but opts not to mention. The mother's silence around this incident compounds her daughter's, and turns out to be far more damaging.

Hadley evokes the awkward, "crucifying" shyness and conflicted feelings of adolescent girls with delicate precision. In "One Saturday Morning," 10-year-old Carrie is upset to learn that a former neighbor's wife has died suddenly. "Carrie took everything to heart," Hadley writes. "She was earnest and susceptible, suffering easily. But it wasn't exactly pity for Helen Smith or her husband or children that overwhelmed her as she knelt in her bedroom. It was something more selfish and protective. She wished fiercely that she'd never learned about Helen's death."

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Other characters seek to shed their sheltered innocence, with mixed results. The young wife who's moved out of her Kentish town flat in "Experience" tries to seduce a blatantly unsuitable man: "I wanted to cross the threshold and be initiated into real life. My innocence was a sign of something maimed or unfinished in me."

"Abduction," a standout in a book of standouts, involves a bored 15-year-old girl's disturbing sexual initiation back in the 1960s, when she's picked up on a lark by three Oxford University students high on booze and drugs. As in several other tales, Hadley heightens our sense of foreboding when her heroines open their doors – or themselves — to strangers whose intentions seem murky at best. We understand what happened to Jane more clearly than she does, for she keeps it safely "sealed in a compartment in her thoughts" for decades, even through marriage. "And in a way she never assimilated the experience, though she didn't forget it either," Hadley writes. The boy, she adds in a coda that bursts the ordinarily confined timeline of short fiction, forgot the incident entirely.

Partly through the legerdemain of such jumps in time, Hadley's stories encompass far more than a short story should be able to contain. Characters – or at least readers – gain perspective by either zooming forward or back decades. A woman shaken by a recent battle with cancer deflects the advances of a lonely young man — and recalls her miserable wedding night in the 1970s with her acid-amped first husband. In doing so, she comes to realize something fundamental about herself: "Because of her background, or perhaps just because of her intrinsic nature, there were certain levels of experience she would never be able to attain; she would never break out of the bounds of her reasonable self."

In Bad Dreams , Tessa Hadley explores what happens when her characters push those bounds.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, bad dreams and other stories.

“Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed.” This startling and compelling line begins “An Abduction,” the first story in Tessa Hadley’s fantastic short story collection, BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES.

Jane, living in Surrey, England, in the 1960s, is lonely on summer break from boarding school but also both apathetic and fast approaching womanhood. Feeling misunderstood and unappreciated by her family, she finds herself standing, tears in her eyes, as a car of three boys drive past her house in a three-seat convertible. The quartet goes to the home of one of the boys, Nigel, where they begin an afternoon and evening of drinking and sensual exploration. Jane returns home early the next morning both changed and more fully herself. She is typical of Hadley’s characters: emotionally isolated, thoughtful, observant, and on the cusp of realization and even transformation.

"There is so much loveliness in BAD DREAMS but also much sorrow and regret as these characters navigate tricky and complex emotional territory, often either finding themselves or purposefully ignoring essential aspects of their own psyches."

The stories in BAD DREAMS are so precisely worded and the characters’ interior lives so finely presented, making them such a pleasure to read. The revelations are always careful and mostly partial. Hadley is less interested in resolution and more focused on capturing and describing moments both quiet and pivotal. She has a deep compassion for her characters yet allows readers more than a glimpse at their flaws.

In “One Saturday Morning,” 10-year-old Carrie finds herself alone at home while her parents run errands. She is saved from the boredom of practicing piano by the unexpected arrival of Dom Smith, a friend of her parents. The evening unfolds with the news of the death of Dom’s wife and Carrie’s voyeuristic view into the world of the adults at a party. Her realization that she may have seen something “headlong and reckless and sweet, unavailable to children” means that she is moving away from childhood.

“Flight” is about the visit of a narcissistic woman to her mostly estranged family under the pretense of meeting her niece’s newborn son. As much as readers may want to believe in Claire’s good intentions, she proves frustratingly selfish and clueless throughout the story. Hadley masterfully sets the scene of the reunion: Claire’s claustrophobic working class English childhood home.

“Silk Brocade” provides readers with a bit more closure than some of the other stories as we learn what becomes of the ambitious young designer and dressmaker Ann Gallagher years after the day she spends at Thwaite Park, the estate where an old acquaintance is set to marry into. Ann’s dreams and goals share much in common with those of many of the women and girls in BAD DREAMS, though each story feels distinct and fully realized.

One standout tale is “Her Share of Sorrow,” which depicts young Ruby, a dull enigma to her dynamic family, who finally, in the attic of a holiday home, finds the stories that unlock a depth and passion in her.

There is so much loveliness in BAD DREAMS but also much sorrow and regret as these characters navigate tricky and complex emotional territory, often either finding themselves or purposefully ignoring essential aspects of their own psyches.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on May 19, 2017

Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

• Publication Date: May 8, 2018
• Genres: Fiction , Short Stories
• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• ISBN-10: 006247667X
• ISBN-13: 9780062476678

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BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES

by Tessa Hadley ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2017

Achingly lovely, though never sentimental, Hadley’s collection renders common lives with exquisite grace.

Acclaimed novelist Hadley ( The Past , 2016, etc.) is back with a collection of 10 quietly explosive short stories that reveal, with unsparing precision, the epic drama simmering beneath the mundanity of everyday life.

A woman takes a job as a caretaker for a difficult old man and finds herself entangled in the family’s internal politics—and unable to avoid learning the secrets of her employer’s past. An indolent 10-year-old, generally a disappointment to her elegant parents, discovers the intoxicating power of fiction on a family vacation in the South of France. A young divorcée takes refuge in the empty home of an older and more glamorous acquaintance and becomes increasingly invested in the more intimate details of her hostess’s life, first through her diary and then through her ex-lover himself. A mother, now ill, goes to visit her adult daughter in Liverpool and has an odd encounter with a strange young man from the train; a London expat returns to her childhood home in Leeds to reconcile with her sister, long estranged. In the title story, a little girl wakes in the night and is overcome with the desire to “disrupt this world of her home” in more ways than she knows. In the closing piece, a dress designer is commissioned to make an old acquaintance’s wedding dress, a venture that is ultimately doomed. Buried under each quotidian moment is the churning of a lifetime; each tiny snapshot seems to offer a window not only into the past, but toward the future. Hadley captures her characters at turning points so subtle they themselves rarely notice them. Ordinary as they are, these are episodes that will echo, softly, throughout her characters' lives.

Pub Date: May 16, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-06-247666-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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BOOK REVIEW

by Tessa Hadley

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Jewell

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• VCAA description of Bad Dreams and Other Stories British-based, contemporary author Tessa Hadley appeared on The New York Times Notable Book of the Year list for her short story collection Bad Dreams and Other Stories. Hadley’s short stories are praised for their ability to illuminate ordinary life. This collection captures characters as they face a crucial moment of transition, highlighting ordinary acts and events, elevating them into the extraordinary. The real things that happen to her characters are often as mysterious as their dreams. Hadley explores the large consequences of small actions through mostly female protagonists in the 20th and 21st centuries, capturing their inner thoughts as they face a turning point in their lives, often without realising it. Hadley’s collection interrogates the lives of characters both young and old. Themes of identity, transformation, social self-awareness, the power of knowledge and the consequences of everyday actions are explored through Hadley’s distinct voice. Hadley’s writing is easily accessible and clear-sighted as she beautifully captures both the predictable and unpredictable nature of people. Students will find her writing offers a great deal of discussion on topics faced in the 21st century.

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• Last Updated: Nov 17, 2023 11:43 AM
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Tessa Hadley

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

A young girl wakes up in the middle of the night in a bedroom she shares with her younger brother . She remembers the dream she was having: she found a secret epilogue to her favorite book , Swallows and Amazons , which described the characters’ later lives and deaths. The girl wanders through the basement apartment, her parents asleep in their own room, and notices how the moonlight makes familiar items in the house seem monstrous.

In the kitchen, all her mother ’s things have been put away neatly, but in the lounge, her father ’s trumpet case is open and his pages of writing, related to the degree he’s pursuing in his free hours after work, are out on his desk. The girl thinks about how her parents are complete, separate human beings. Suddenly, she gets an urge to upset the neat stillness of the house, so she pushes over several pieces of furniture in the lounge. She decides she’ll never tell her parents about what she did tonight.

The girl’s mother wakes up early and gets out of bed quietly so as not to wake her husband (the girl’s father). She reflects on how she’s come to resent this basement apartment, though they won’t be able to move into their own home until her husband completes his degree. She wanders through the apartment, wishing she were an artist instead of a housewife. When she sees the mess in the lounge, she first thinks that there’s an intruder in the home. But after finding the windows locked, she decides that her husband must have caused the chaos. Though this upsets her, she also feels gratified to have some evidence for what she has long suspected: that her husband is her enemy. She tidies the room and goes back to bed, resolving not to bring the incident up to her husband.

When everyone wakes up for the day, the mother fries bacon for the father’s breakfast. He embraces her and they share a kiss. The mother goes to find the girl, who is attempting to get ready for school while reading her favorite book from the beginning again. The mother takes the book away and tells the girl to hurry up.

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Bad Dreams by Tessa Hadley | Book Review

Rabeea Saleem  reviews  Bad Dreams  by  Tessa Hadley ,   showing how her stories capture the multifaceted life experiences of so many women.

In the title story ‘Bad Dreams’, a young girl wakes up from an eerie dream in the middle of the night. The dream is so disturbing that “the strong dread it had left behind didn’t subside with the confusion of waking . ” In the dream, she was reading her favourite book, Swallows and Amazons, the classic story of an adventurous group of young children. It’s one of those books she has read countless times but strangely, in her dream, her subconscious has conjured up an epilogue that did not exist in the real book, and which recounts the gloomy fates of these perpetually joyous children. She finds out that one of her beloved characters drowned, another was killed in an unfortunate accident; others also met pitiful ends. The bleak destinies of the characters she so dearly loves was what startled her from her sleep. Now awake, she can’t shake off this daunting prescience, which she can’t unlearn. The description of how this morbid dream tainted this child’s naivety is acutely unsettling. “The litany of deaths tore jaggedly into the tissue that the book had woven, making everything lopsided and hideous.”

The story continues with the girl walking around in the darkness, taking in the haunting details of her house. Like her dream which coaxed her out of her childish innocence, the house seems to be waiting to share its secrets with her. She discovers in the darkness that all the details that seem so obvious might as well be invisible in daytime. The atmosphere of stark reality among the mundane that Hadley weaves is beguiling, and is apparent in all the stories in this collection.

The slice of life tales in Bad Dreams all feature female protagonists. With parochial plots, these stories focus on the internal worlds of its complex principal characters. They are snapshots of the different experiences women go through. Tess Hadley has an uncanny ability to latch onto the myriad conflicting emotions a person can feel in one moment. She captures the most fleeting moment, homing in on all the nuances in glorious detail.

What works about her stories is that while they all involve the characters contemplating their interior monologues, her shrewd insights makes these passages captivating rather than dull. In ‘Under the Sign of the Moon’, while two strangers are having an erudite conversation full of platitudes, Hadley focuses on our conflicting needs to confide in other people and at the same time guard our private lives.

Most stories start with a young girl in the middle of a crucial experience – not life-changing in the scope of its impact the seemingly prosaic moments that are the most affecting. Later the stories fast forward to the same women in later days of their lives. Readers chart how a trivial conversation or event that took place decades ago changed someone’s enduring outlook on life.

Another consistent theme in this collection is that of remembrance. Tessa Hadley explores the multifaceted ways our past and present collide, the influence they exert on us and how much of our past experiences we carry with ourselves. Hadley’s keen psychological acumen and talent for capturing people at different moments in their lives renders these stories profundity. Most of the stories in Hadley’s new collection end with an epiphany, adding something substantial to the way her characters, and her readers, perceive life.

Tessa Hadley’s Bad Dreams is published by Penguin Books .

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Bad Dreams and Other Stories Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 16, 2017

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Winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

An NPR Best Book of the Year

The award-winning author of The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" ( Washington Post ), in a collection of stories that elevate the mundane into the exceptional.

The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proven herself to be the champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket.

Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists.

A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Tessa Hadley "puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master" (Lily King, author of Euphoria ).

• Print length 240 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date May 16, 2017
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.97 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0062476661
• ISBN-13 978-0062476661
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“Marvelous…. Every situation captivates; every carefully chosen word rings true.” — People

“These consummately crafted tales reveal Hadley’s unflinching audacity and her peerless gift for revealing ourselves as we are, not as we wish to be.” — Oprah.com

“It is impossible to overstate how much I admire the work of Tessa Hadley; her mastery of the smallest gestures on the page is breathtaking and her ability to weave a symphonic whole time after time thrilling. Every story in this collection is beautiful, precise, expansive, and a joy.” — Robin Roberts, Good Morning America

“Her meticulously observed, extraordinarily perceptive stories are as satisfying as Alice Munro’s. Yes, Hadley is that good…. Instantly immersive…. Unlike many short story writers, who serve up slices of life cut so thin you’re left craving more, Hadley offers both rich complexity and satisfying closure.” — Heller McAlpin, NPR

“Like Murakami, Tessa Hadley’s marvelous new collection, ‘Bad Dreams and Other Stories’ scrutinizes difficult, messy relationships…. Hadley demonstrates how brief, powerful relationships can forever change people…. Deliciously, Hadley’s characters also practice the art of deceit, unaware how stacked lies will eventually topple over onto them.” — Don Waters, San Francisco Chronicle

“Quietly explosive short stories that reveal, with unsparing precision, the epic drama simmering beneath the mundanity of everyday life…. Achingly lovely, though never sentimental, Hadley’s collection renders common lives with exquisite grace.” — Kirkus , starred review

“Remarkably precise and perceptive…. In subtly insightful and observant prose, Hadley writes brilliantly of the words and gestures that pass unnoticed ‘in the intensity of [the] present’ but echo without cease.” — Publishers Weekly , starred review

“Masterful…. Each story is more memorable than the next as Hadley seduces readers with a reassuring gentleness that craftily covers the steely danger that lies within each flawed and fragile relationship.” — Booklist

“Hadley is so insightful, such a lovely writer, that she pulls you right into the tangle of wires that connect and trip up the stressed siblings. She makes you feel for these imperfect people, want to scold them, and ultimately accept them as they are. Just like family.” — Kim Hubbard, People , Book of the week, on The Past

“Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts.” — Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies , on The Past

“What Hadley’s stories share with Munro’s is an extraordinary ability to capture whole worlds — the hopes, disappointments, complexity and arc of characters’ lives — in concise prose that never feels rushed.” — Heller McAplin, San Francisco Chronicle , on Married Love

“Hadley’s genius and Gregory’s splendid performance have given us an audiobook that can be listened to over and over again.” — Washington Post (Audio Edition)

From the Back Cover

The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proved herself to be a champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories, it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be the most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket.

Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminates crucial moments of transition often imperceptible to the protagonists.

A girl accepts a lift in a car from some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and dreams.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Hadley “puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master” (Lily King, author of Euphoria ).

About the Author

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including  Clever Girl  and  The Past,  as well as three short story collections, most recently  Bad Dreams and Other Stories , which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in  The New Yorker ; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; First U.S. edition (May 16, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062476661
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062476661
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.97 x 8.25 inches
• #21,541 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #28,872 in Short Stories (Books)
• #71,585 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Tessa hadley.

Tessa Hadley is the author of four highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award; Everything Will Be All Right; The Master Bedroom; and The London Train, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of two short-story collections, Sunstroke and Married Love, both of which were New York Times Notable Books as well. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker. She lives in London.

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The Sunday Read: ‘What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living’

Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind..

By Phoebe Zerwick

Read by Samantha Desz

Produced by Jack D’Isidoro and Aaron Esposito

Narration produced by Anna Diamond and Emma Kehlbeck

Original music by Aaron Esposito

Engineered by Sophia Lanman and Sharon Kearney

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.

Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn’t delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada.

Kerr followed his father into medicine, and in the last 10 years he has hired a permanent research team that expanded studies on deathbed visions to include interviews with patients receiving hospice care at home and with their families, deepening researchers’ understanding of the variety and profundity of these visions.

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Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan.

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