20181215_165122.jpgHappy Friday!  Today I have a review of Late in the Day, publishing on January 15, 2019 via Harper Books.

My Thoughts:

Two couples have been the best of friends since their twenties. For over thirty years, it’s been Zach and Lydia and Alex and Christine through it all. 

One night Christine and Alex receive a call from Lydia. Zach has unexpectedly passed away. 

Interestingly, all the friends agree that Zach was the best of the group. They put him on a posthumous pedestal and grief swallows their days. 

Lydia is having such a difficult time, Alex and Christine have her move in with them. But this closeness in their grief is not a good thing. Their friendships are now in jeopardy. 

Late in the Day is all about the characters, how they experience loss, and highlighting the complex dynamics of close relationships. The writing is beautiful and so easy to read. I also found it insightful, sensitive, and brilliant. Hadley exposed these characters’ innermost feelings, which are not always pretty or expected. 

Tessa Hadley has written an emotional tale of friendship and love, heartbreak and grief, with this intensely and intentionally drawn character study, relatable, very much human, characters, and an intricately woven dynamic of intimate relationships in adulthood. I loved this one! 

Thanks to Harper Books for the complimentary copy. All opinions are my own. 

Synopsis:

The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who “recruits admirers with each book” (Hilary Mantel).

Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead.

In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

Late in the Day explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again “crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural” (Washington Post).

Have you read Late in the Day, or is it on your TBR? Happy Reading! ~ Jennifer THR