Midlife is tough enough without moving back to your hometown to care for your mother, who is succumbing to dementia. Having taken a leave from her London teaching position, Kate Flynn is now in Cardiff, Wales, living with mom Billie in Firenze, their now dilapidated ancestral villa. She reconnects with best friend Carol and, ultimately, with David, Carol's younger brother. David's first wife, Fran-cesca, committed suicide years earlier. Left with his young son, Jamie, David eventually married Suzie and had two more children. But Suzie is suddenly acting strangely, and David is bewildered by his now 17-year-old son. David runs into Kate at a concert, and their mutual interest in classical music seems like an omen to him. Discovering that Kate knew his mother, Jamie also gravitates toward Firenze and lands in an affair in that rarely used bedroom. Unfortunately, Kate is the least sympathetic character in this latest from Hadley (Everything Will Be All Right). She is gruff with poor Billie (always has been, really), dismissive yet needy of Jamie's attentions, and unable to acknowledge David's feelings. Despite generally fine writing, this novel suffers from this major flaw; an optional purchase for large fiction collections.-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Dissipated and dreary, much like her family's ancestral estate in the Welsh countryside, Kate Flynn's life has slumped dangerously out of control. After jettisoning her once-promising academic career and intoxicating London lifestyle to return to Cardiff to care for her senile mother, Kate despairs of her self-imposed exile until a chance encounter with the brother of a childhood friend promises a glimmer of hope. For his part, David, too, suffers from a pervasive malaise: his first wife committed suicide; his second marriage is disintegrating; and his teenage son, Jamie, is growing increasingly secretive and distant. Introduced to Kate as someone who could tell him about the mother he never knew, Jamie is immediately attracted to Kate's sophisticated ways and soon insinuates himself into her bohemian home, where he unwittingly joins his father as a rival for her affections. Melancholy and starkly emotive, Hadley's enervating tale evokes the raw drama that lies at the emotional nexus between friends and lovers, husbands and wives, parents and children.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2007 Booklist

What if it had been Mrs. Robinson who was the pursued, and Benjamin the pursuer? What if, when the young man came knocking, the grown woman hid, locked her bedroom door and "stayed motionless on her bed, not answering, hugging her knees tightly"? What if, when he refused to believe she couldn't love him, she didn't run to him, but from him? In Tessa Hadley's third novel, "The Master Bedroom," that's the predicament faced by Kate Flynn, a brainy and forbidding beauty with delicate bones, "Nefertiti eyes" and a mean tongue, who has quit her professor's job in London and returned to her grand but crumbling childhood home in Wales to care for her 83-year-old, increasingly forgetful mother. Kate doesn't like it when a local boy, the son of a friend, starts hanging around the house, scything the grass, playing the piano, yearning for her touch. But it's not as if there's anyone else in the picture, exactly. And what if, for all her 43 years and Jamie's 17, it's Kate who's the child, living in her detached intellectual fantasy world, and Jamie who's the grown-up, precociously reconciled to the fact that denying life's complicating passions doesn't make them go away? "Personal stuff" is "smoke," Kate tells Jamie, trying to sound distancingly in control. "It's the rest that's smoke," he replies, and adds, "I know you better than you think I do." In some ways, he knows her better than she knows herself. But to a woman addicted to self-delusion, that's no victory. Tessa Hadley is a lovely, subtly teasing writer, studiedly evasive in her treatment of emotions and eerily precise in her sketches of everyday people in upper-middle-class British settings. Who her characters are, and what they want, is so deeply concealed (even from themselves) that they could be nude and lose none of their mystery. Hadley's observations of the ebb and flow of female desire and frustration are reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, but she taps sensual undercurrents where Woolf wouldn't have dipped her toe. Hadley is so good at miniature - at close focus on a small scene that could be missed if you didn't look twice - that it's almost frustrating to read her longer works. A fleeting paragraph, dropped in to advance the plot, could easily have been transformed into one of her stately, enveloping short stories. In "The Master Bedroom," a tormented relationship flies by in a few lines: "She really shouldn't be phoning Max. Max had been desperate for four years with love for Kate; when he finally understood that he couldn't possess with certainty even enough of her to preserve his dignity, he had saved himself and found a sweet girl instead to have babies with. All this change was new enough for the babies not to exist yet, except as an idea." But Max and his chagrins must make way for the larger subject of the novel, which revolves around the people Kate encounters in Cardiff: a friend from her teens named Carol; Carol's stolid doctor brother, David; his "farouche" wife, Suzie, a brusque, freckled blonde; and David's children - two young ones he had with Suzie, and Jamie, the child of his first wife, a clever, high-strung woman who flung herself from the window of a high-rise apartment building when Jamie was only 3. David met Suzie when he was newly widowed, inexpertly pushing Jamie in a stroller in Regent's Park. Coming upon them when Jamie was crying, Suzie soothed the child ("he allowed himself to be hugged against her chest in return for licks of ice cream") and won the father. But at the time the novel is set, Suzie is straying, and Jamie lurks in the family attic in a pot-heavy fug of adolescent alienation. In "The Master Bedroom," no relationship is as solid as it might seem, no course of action necessarily makes sense, and motivations are buried. Yet Hadley's favorite theme emerges clearly: the heart has no logic, the brain cannot always keep it in rein and nature controls human behavior - not the other way around. The novel is a chess game of slow-burn erotic maneuvers that produce tantalizingly unpredictable outcomes. Appearing here at about the same time as the novel is "Sunstroke," a collection of Hadley's miraculous short stories. Deft and resonant, they encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived. Hadley never fails to surprise, but her surprises are understated - not the "aha" fakery of some gimmicky short fiction but the small shift in expectations or results that's deeply felt but doesn't show, like the twitch of a rudder that sets a boat gliding on a new course. In the title story, two 30-ish mothers wonder which of them a potential lover may have his eye on-if he even does. In "The Surrogate," an unassuming young woman with a crush on her professor seduces a working-class bloke who reminds her of her idol. In "Matrilineal," a daughter remembers the day her mother left her father, but her mother's memory conflicts with hers. The collection has an intriguing tie with the novel: in the story called "Phosphorescence," a frazzled young mother, visiting friends at the Welsh seaside, flirts with her hosts' teenage son, venting feelings she doesn't know she possesses, not thinking of the consequences. On a night when the water is "full of phosphorescence, tiny sea creatures that glowed in the dark," the boy takes her and her daughters out in a boat. As he rows in his bare feet, the water drips "with liquid light," and when the oars plunge back into the water "ripples of light went racing out." Afloat in the natural world, barraged by microsopic particles of stubborn life, the woman lays her feet on his, rubbing them up and down: "he could feel the thick calloused skin on her heels and on the balls of her feet." The wet sand sticks to their ankles and calves. "The next day she went," Hadley writes, "and he suffered. For the first time like an adult, secretly." Hadley's gift for conveying adolescence's "pent-up articulacy" recalls the sensibility of the author of a slim book, more memoir than novel, called "The Devil in the Flesh," written by a supernally sensitive French teenager, Raymond Radiguet, who died of typhoid in 1923 at the age of 20. In it he memorializes a grand passion between a 16-year-old boy and a girl several years older whose soldier husband is off at war. Others mock their connection; the old woman who lives beneath his lover's apartment invites friends over to eavesdrop on the couple's trysts, as if it were all a game. The narrator, in torment because his youth makes him ridiculous, learns with dismay that as he grows older he doesn't feel more secure in his love. "In thinking that I was less naïve," he writes, "I was merely being naïve in a different way, since one is naïve at every age. And the naïvety of old age is not the least of them." It's a truth that Tessa Hadley's writing knows: there's no grown-up way to love. A fleeting paragraph in Hadley's novel could easily have been transformed into one of her enveloping short stories. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

This dreamy and thoughtful third novel from Hadley (Everything Will Be Alright and Accidents in the Home) chronicles the slow-burning midlife crisis of Kate Flynn. A cigarette-smoking, high-heel-wearing Russian lit. prof, Kate has given up frittering among the London intelligentsia to move back to Wales and care for her aging mother, Billie. Against the backdrop of wintry Cardiff, Kate contends with her rekindled desire for David Roberts, now a married public health doctor. She simultaneously attempts to ward off the infatuated advances of David's teenage son, Jamie. As all concerned cavort provokingly, Hadley sympathizes with her quirky, stubborn characters and impulsive protagonist without excusing them, and the simmering love triangle between David, his son and Kate keeps the placid storytelling from falling into a meditative lull. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved