A Picador Paperback Original

Tessa Hadley’s stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships.

A mother hears her son’s confession that he’s cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close.

In Tessa Hadley’s Sunstroke and Other Stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.