Questioning tales

Tessa Hadley’s previous book, The London Train, was one of the best novels of last year, though overlooked by prize committees. It concerned the gently disentangling lives of a pair of middle-class couples, and found its strengths in numinous revelations of the everyday.

These short stories (all previously printed in magazines such as Granta and The New Yorker) explore, with a questioning intelligence, a mostly similar territory.