Masterful...Tessa Hadley's skill is in taking the ordinary and twisting it, tearing through the surface of veiled emotions kept at bay by everyday humdrum to reveal the hidden tensions and quiet panic beneath More, please.

TESSA HADLEY'S STORIES explore the moment in a relationship in which we discover that we are in over our heads--that our desires are too volatile, too complex, to be managed, and our attachments are not as strong as we had thought. With each small discovery, whole hidden histories shake loose, and new temptations arise. In this collection, a mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him; a boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up friend of his family, a woman starved for contact, is pressing dangerously close against him.

Tessa Hadley's incisive, crystalline stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and other magazines in recent years, tracing the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief in our hidden lives. Like her acclaimed novels,these stories fracture accepted ideas about domesticity and sexual politics, revealing the precarious balance at the heart of relationships:spikes of desire, fits of resentment, painful compromises, and the occasional, dizzying moment of contentment.

Sunstroke

Mother's Son

Buckets of Blood

Phosphorescence

The Enemy

The Surrogate

Exchanges

A Card Trick

The Eggy Stone

Matrilineal