Read this book. What else can I say, and how else should I say it? Read this book because it is magnificent.</p>
I’m appalled to think I’ve only recently discovered Tessa Hadley. A few weeks ago, I’d never heard of her, but then I stumbled across a review of her previous novel, <i>The London Train</i>, got a copy of her latest, and have been hooked and devoted since. I’ve greedily acquired all of her novels and short stories and clutch them to me as I read, devouring every word at speed whilst at the same time terrified to finish them.</p>
<i>Clever Girl</i> is her latest novel and tells the story of Stella, a working-class girl growing up in the 60s. Narrated in the first-person, we follow Stella from her childhood in a tiny Bristol bedsit, living with her feisty mother who manages to remain chic despite the damp laundry, the creeping grime and the grassy bombsites amidst which they live.</p>
They’re scooped into material comfort when her mother remarries but life in the trim suburbs doesn’t suit Stella who’s entering her teenage years. By now it’s now the 70s and she meets the decade with determined glee, strolling to school in her short skirt and heavy eyeliner, desperate for life to show itself.
An infatuation with a local boy prompts her to move out of the constricting air of home and off she goes on a trajectory, pulling us with her, through a bohemian life in a flower-strewn squat, childbirth, working in a vegan café, an affair with a married man, bereavement, marriage... It’s all here and we’re with her throughout.</p></p>
There is no easy beginning, middle and end to the novel. There is no neat chart to plot which shows the ‘important’ bits of the story. The novel eases us through each page, like a great ocean liner cutting smoothly through the waves, so that we don’t realise the distance we’ve travelled till we look back and gasp. </p>
Her use of metaphor throughout is divine and precise, with prose so beautiful it cries to be sung aloud, chanted, yelled from some high place. 



<i>Clever Girl</i> is published by Jonathan Cape

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