 clever girl by tessa hadley read this book what else can i say and how else should i say it read this book because it is magnificent 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  the london train  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 clever girl is her latest novel and tells the story of stella a workingclass girl growing up in the 60s narrated in the firstperson 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 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 flowerstrewn 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 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 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 clever girl is published by jonathan cape book review tessa hadley archive h 