The Party
‘A glimmering tale of two sisters’ Financial Times
‘My favourite author’ Kate Atkinson
Tessa Hadley
PRAISE FOR THE PARTY
‘Evelyn and Moira’s experience of becoming adults in a world dawning with new life is so exhilarating it’s almost tangible. Tessa Hadley is one of our finest chroniclers, and this novella is a glimmering, sensuous addition to her supremely elegant oeuvre’
Philip Womack, Financial Times
‘One of Britain’s most beloved writers . . . The tale turns on a pent-up thirst for experience and escape’
Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail
‘I love being held by one of Hadley’s stories –pure pleasure’
Alex Pavesi, Observer
‘A vivid portrait of post-war Britain . . . The story remains closely focused on two women over one weekend, but the outside world seeps in . . . Hadley’s touch [is] delicate as ever’
Sarah Moss, Guardian
‘You read Tessa Hadley for the details . . . What she offers to the reader is a luxurious descriptive carefulness’
Laura Hackett, Sunday Times
‘There are authors to whom one can always turn in confidence, whose gift for storytelling is matched by their dexterity with language. Across twelve previous books, Tessa Hadley has elevated herself into this category, but with The Party, she’s also proved that she can achieve in 100 pages what it might take others three times that amount to accomplish’
John Boyne, Irish Times
‘Exhilarating . . . A deft tale of risk and possibility –of two sisters slipping from the house and changing into party clothes; drinking, dancing, bolting down fire escapes; teetering on the line between disaster and self-discovery’
Alison Kelly, TLS
‘Captivating – you’ll read it in a day . . . Both a coming-of-age story and a depiction of a sibling relationship, with its see-sawing camaraderie and resentment, intimacy and disdain’
Fiona Sturges, i Paper
TESSA HADLEY
Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day and Free Love, and four collections of stories: Sunstroke, Married Love, Bad Dreams and After the Funeral. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016 and she has twice been awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, for 2018 and for 2024. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.
ALSO BY TESSA HADLEY
Accidents in the Home
Everything Will Be All Right
Sunstroke and Other Stories
The Master Bedroom
The London Train
Married Love
Clever Girl
The Past
Bad Dreams and Other Stories
Late in the Day
Free Love
After the Funeral and Other Stories
TESSA HADLEY
The Party
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First published in Vintage in 2025 First published in hardback by Jonathan Cape in 2024
Copyright © Tessa Hadley 2024
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for Gilly
and for the Happy Cranes
Tom, Tim and Jenny
Vincent’s Party
The party was in full swing. Evelyn could hear the sexy blare of the trad jazz almost as soon as she got off the bus at St Mary Redcliffe and began walking over to the Steam Packet, the pub which Vincent – who was a friend of Evelyn’s older sister Moira – had commandeered for that evening. He’d decided they all needed a party to cheer them up, because the winter had been so bitter, and because now in February the incessant rain had turned the snow to slush. It was raining again this evening; the bus’s wiper had beaten its numb rhythm all the way into town, the pavements were dark with wet, the gutters ran with water. Frozen filthy formless lumps, the remainders of the snow, persisted at the street corners and in the deep recesses between the buildings, loomed sinisterly in the gaping bombsites. Crossing the road, Evelyn had to put up her umbrella – actually her mother’s worn
old green umbrella with the broken rib and the duck’s head handle, which she’d borrowed without asking on her way out, because she’d lost her own somewhere. Probably she’d get in trouble for this tomorrow, but she didn’t care, she was too full of agitated happiness. Anything could happen between now and tomorrow. Evelyn couldn’t believe her luck, that she was going to an actual party – and not just any dull ordinary party but this wild one with her sister’s friends, in a halfderelict old pub with a terrible reputation, hanging over the black water in the city docks. If her parents had known where the party was they’d never have let her out, but she’d lied to them so fluently and easily, saying that Moira had promised to look after her, and that they were meeting in the Victoria Rooms. She was proud of herself. Who knew that you could be a Sunday school teacher one minute, asking the children to crayon in pictures of Jesus holding up a lantern, with a lost lamb tucked under his other arm, and then lie to your parents with such perfectly calibrated innocent sweetness?
The rain didn’t matter, Evelyn was impervious to it. Picking her way between the streams of water rippling on the roads, not wanting to spoil her fashionable unsuitable black ballet flats, she enjoyed the contrast between this desolate outer universe and the heat of her life burning up inside. When she’d had to change buses at the Centre, she’d gone into a cubicle in the