Free Love

From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes a compulsively readable novel about a suburban housewife's reawakening in 1960s London.

GABI'S REVIEW

Free Love (2022), my favourite of Tessa Hadley’s novels is set in late-sixties London: Phyllis, a middle-class, middle-aged woman leaves her marriage for a much younger impoverished political journalist and writer. The setup invites nostalgia, liberation mythology, easy moral positioning, and Hadley refuses all of it. Instead, she shows how a moment of social upheaval felt from the inside.

Hadley offers this decision in the way human motivation operates not as articulable reason but as felt emotion. She shows us that the costs of stepping outside an entire social infrastructure are complex. From one angle it reads as authentic self-discovery, from another possibly class tourism, and it reads like destruction from the perspective of her children. The younger generation’s freedom, which is supposed to be the real thing looks equally compromised and confused and nobody in the book arrives at an uncomplicated relationship with what they want, but Hadley never judges. If as it is said, novels train the moral imagination, read Tessa Hadley for her expansive empathy.

PUBLISHER REVIEW

From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes a compulsively readable novel about a suburban housewife's reawakening in 1960s London.

It's 1967 and London is alive with the new youth revolution. In the suburbs, meanwhile, Phyllis Fischer inhabits a world of conventional stability. Married with two children, her life is both comfortable and predictable.

But when Nicky - a twenty-something friend of the family - visits one hot summer evening and kisses Phyllis in the dark of the garden, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations . . .