**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach was the sanest and kindest of them all, 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 tangled webs at the centre 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 shows that she has 'become one of this country's great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them.' (Anthony Quinn, Guardian) 'Hadley brings the gifts of a still-life painter to her fiction yet manages to produce satisfying twists and turns to her storytelling.' Mellissa Benn, New Statesman

Author Biography

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, and three short-story collections, most recently Bad Dreams. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker. In 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize; in 2018 she was awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for Bad Dreams.