Everything will be all right Book

It's hard to explain why this novel kept me so absorbed. There's no plot as such, and not all that much happens, other than normal life events seen through three generations of women. But Tessa Hadley's skill is in taking you so thoroughly into the heads of her characters that you become them. Their experiences touch you as if you were living them. I found this particularly the case with Zoe, no doubt because she is the same generation as me. I recognised not just myself in her, but people I know. Zoe at school:

... it could not be endurable, surely something would give way. But of course it was endurable, it was only school and not real torture, and at last the clock would deliver up hometime and the walk to the bus ... Here at last was repose, in the gap before the driver started up the engine and the conductor came selling tickets; she sank into herself, dreaming, alone, hugging her briefcase on her knees, turning her head away if girls in green uniform got on.
[...]
She wasn't much liked by the teachers or by many of the girls; she could see herself that there was something unattractive in how she cherished her apartness, unresponsive in class, refusing to be charmed when the teachers were funny and courted them, sceptical of the togetherness of the gangs of girls.

Zoe does make a close friend, Fiona, but inevitably they drift apart as Zoe moves towards academia; much of the rest of the novel concerns her struggle to continue her career and avoid slipping into what she perceives as her mother's dull domesticity after she has a child against the wishes of her partner. Somehow, all this is fascinating, and despite what it sounds like it's a very far cry from chick lit! Deeply intelligent and reflective.