Late in the Day

October 8, 2018
Hadley’s perceptive, finely wrought novel (after Bad Dreams) traces the impact of the death of one man on three others. When affable art gallery owner Zachary dies suddenly in his 50s, he leaves behind not only his flamboyant and determinedly helpless widow, Lydia, but also the couple closest to them, Alex and Christine. Alex, an acerbic failed poet turned primary school teacher, and Christine, an artist who frequently exhibits her work in Zach’s gallery, have a long, complicated relationship with Zach and Lydia. Christine and Lydia, friends since childhood, met the two slightly older men when the young women were just out of college. Lydia set her sights on the melancholy Alex, who barely noticed her. Instead, he settled into a relationship with the at first reluctant Christine after her brief fling with Zach, who was actually infatuated with Lydia. Over the years, the two couples settled into the passive happiness of married life, but Zach’s death forces Lydia, Alex, and Christine to finally confront the feelings Alex and Lydia have for each other. As the two move forward together, and Christine, to her own surprise, discovers that she relishes time alone, Alex and Christine’s daughter Grace decides to make a death mask of her father, and moves in with Alex and Christine’s daughter Isobel. Hadley is a writer of the first order, and this novel gives her the opportunity to explore, with profound incisiveness and depth, the inevitable changes inherent to long-lasting marriages.

August 1, 2018

Couples Alexandr and Christine, Zachary and Lydia have been tight as glue since their twenties and thought that nothing would change. Decades later, when a distraught Lydia calls Alex and Christine to report that Zach has died, she's immediately invited to come live with her old friends. But grandly generous Zach was their foundation, and the three left behind find that grief doesn't bring them closer, instead highlighting old conflicts. From the lusciously articulate Hadley, winner of the 2016 Windham Campbell Prize.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2018

The peaceful, settled lives of school headmaster Alexandr and his artist wife, Christine, are upended by a phone call from their oldest friend, Lydia, telling them that husband Zachary has suddenly dropped dead. When they had all first connected years earlier, the pairings were reversed. Lydia had developed a huge crush on Alex, her handsome French teacher, who also happened to be married with a young son. First offering to babysit and gradually insinuating herself into Alex's group of friends, Lydia picked out Zachary for Christine. But when Alex's marriage began to come apart, he was drawn instead to Christine, just as his close friend Zach was falling for Lydia. Marriages and a daughter for each couple tightened their bonds, and their lives followed parallel and symbiotic paths until Zach's untimely death turned things upside down. VERDICT In the fine tradition of women's fiction by authors such as Margaret Drabble, Penelope Lively, and Rachel Cusk exploring relationships among the cultured classes, Hadley's place is secure. [See Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2018
The 30-year bond between a quartet of close friends--two couples--comes unglued when one of them dies unexpectedly in Hadley's (The Past, 2016, etc.) quietly riveting latest.Christine and Alex and Lydia and Zachary have been close since their early 20s; now in their 50s, they're still close, the friendships among them still anchoring their lives. And then one night, Christine and Alex are listening to music when the telephone rings. It's Lydia, from the hospital. Zachary is dead. He was fine, at his office at the gallery, talking about the next show, and then he wasn't. Then he keeled over and was dead. For all the years they've known each other, Zachary has been a gentle force of nature. "Of all of us," Christine thinks, "he's the one we couldn't afford to lose." In the immediate aftermath of his death, the families band together: Alex goes to collect Lydia and Zachary's daughter from college; Lydia comes to live, for a while, with her best friends. The women have been close since childhood, Lydia theatrical and romantic and borderline frivolous; Christine serious and artistic, the practical one of the pair. Shortly after university, the women met Alex and Zachary, also childhood friends. In the early days, it was Lydia who was in love with Alex, although he was unhappily married to somebody else. Zachary was well-matched with Christine. The partnerships evolved without animosity: Zachary married Lydia, in the end. Alex married Christine. For three decades, they remained close, the history between them no threat to the happy present. But after Zachary's death, their pleasant equilibrium is thrown forever off-kilter, as remnants from the past bubble up to the surface. A four-person character study--here as always, Hadley is a master of interpersonal dynamics--the novel captures the complexity of loss. Their grief is not only for Zachary; it is for the lives they thought they knew.Restrained and tender.

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