Just such an evocative read. Tessa Hadley captures 60s Notting Hill as I remember it. If you haven't yet discovered this wonderful writer this book is a great start.

“Free Love” is set in the late 1960s and is told from multiple perspectives, mainly of the Fischer family: stay at home wife Phyllis, husband Roger who works in the Foreign Office and their two children, teenage Colette and Hugh who is still a child but on the verge of growing up. Everything in their lives is ordinary until one day, the son of a family friend comes for dinner and the events of that evening throw a bomb into their lives. What follows are journeys of self discovery for all of the characters, along with the revealing of family secrets.

I really enjoyed this book and particularly liked that we got to view the story from lots of different perspectives without having to rehash the same parts of the plot over and over. While saying too much would give away spoilers, I did feel it got a bit bogged down in the middle of the book and that some of the additional characters were unnecessary. But the descriptions of sixties Britain and the changing values of that time were really interesting. I would definitely recommend this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

Tessa Hadley's *Free Love* is a captivating exploration of love, freedom, and self-discovery, set against the backdrop of the swinging sixties in London. Hadley masterfully portrays Phyllis Fischer, a seemingly content housewife whose life takes an unexpected turn when she falls for a younger man, who happens to be her son's friend. This encounter destabilizes her secure, middle-class existence, forcing her to confront her own desires and societal expectations.

Hadley excels at crafting complex and believable characters. Phyllis is particularly well-developed, with her internal struggles and gradual awakening depicted with nuance and empathy. You come to understand her choices, even if you don't necessarily agree with them.

The novel vividly captures the atmosphere of 1960s London, reflecting its social and cultural shifts. Hadley subtly weaves in the changing landscape of the city and the era's burgeoning sense of liberation, providing essential context for Phyllis's transformation.

*Free Love* delves into themes of marriage, motherhood, societal constraints, and the search for personal fulfillment. Instead of offering easy answers or judgments, Hadley invites readers to contemplate the complexities of human relationships and individual choices.

Her writing is precise and evocative, drawing you into the story with beautiful imagery and insightful observations. However, the novel's pacing can feel uneven at times, with some sections lingering longer than necessary. While the open ending adds to the story's realism, some readers may find it frustratingly inconclusive.

*Free Love* is a compelling and thought-provoking novel that will resonate with readers long after they turn the final page. Hadley's insightful exploration of human nature and her ability to craft characters who feel both familiar and extraordinary make this a truly rewarding read. If you enjoy character-driven stories with a strong sense of place and a touch of social commentary, *Free Love* is definitely worth picking up.

A smart and powerfully observed take on infidelity and London in the swinging sixties. Cleverly plotted and brilliantly paced, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will definitely seek out other writing by Hadley.

Wife, mother, suburban home. Conventional and stable.

But what if, at a time in the 60s when the world around is changing so much and letting go and letting loose, YOU want to do the same? Phyllis steps out of stable and conventional into wild and daring and explores what it means to actually be free, happy and loved.

Phyllis is a forty year old married housewife with two children - quiet and bookish Colette, and golden boy Hugh. It's the late 1960's and she is reasonably happy with her life...at least she isn't unhappy with it. Her husband, Roger, has a good job and both she and the children want for nothing. Then the twenty-something son a close friend comes over for dinner one night. Nick is young, arrogant and turns up very late and drunk. Choosing to overlook this, the family still enjoy dinner though Phyllis is a little put out that her charms don't appear to be working on the young man and leads to her questioning her desirability now she is over 40. However, the hunt for a child's sandal in next doors garden leads to Nick and Phyllis sharing a kiss...and setting off a sequence of events that involve Phyllis beginning a clandestine love affair with Nick before walking out on her life and moving into his one room flat in London just before Christmas.

In London, Phyllis discovers a new side to her personality - a side that isn't worried about age gaps, cleanliness and security, instead she swaps all this for the heedless pursuit of pleasure and drugs. Nick is propped up by his mother and doesn't seem to have any money of his own - he spends his days either in bed with Phyllis or endlessly writing about politics trying to make his way in a cut throat world of socialism. Evenings are spent with his artistic friends who get drunk, get high and hold raves on demolition sites. Phyllis ends up pregnant and living in her own flat while Nick sleeps his way through his female friends.

Meanwhile, Hugh is shipped off to boarding school and refuses to speak to or about his mother again as he is a silent witness to his mother's infidelity. Colette quietly goes off the rails without anyone seeming to notice - she starts skipping school and then goes to London to try to find her mother before becoming mixed up in her mothers new hippy, hedonistic lifestyle.

Throw in a plot twist that was fairly obvious (at least to me) from about the half way point and you have the makings of...something a little bit bizarre. Yes, Hadley creates a sense of place incredibly well - some of the descriptions are beautiful, you can almost see and smell the places she describes, but the characters felt too one dimensional and irritating to be honest. Roger is boring and staid and doesn't change at all - even when Phyllis leaves, Colette is passive aggressive and chock full of attitude - something that doesn't change, in fact she seems to embark on an affair with the very much older Paul just to aggravate her mother (I couldn't help but think it was a cry for help that everyone ignored), Hugh is rude and arrogant and remains a peripheral character throughout the story given no consideration by just about everyone, Nick is just horrible and Phyllis I found unbelievable - would someone really just walk away from their life on the whim of a kiss with someone wholly inappropriate?

It is a slow moving book that I struggled to connect with and I found that a bit disappointing.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Random House UK and Netgalley and I really wish I'd read this sooner.
Beautifully written and I really enjoyed this book. Being a 60's child (well born in the 60's I don't remember much about them) I really wanted to read this and am glad I did.
I would highly recommend this book and will probably read it again.

It's 1967 and we are introduced to the Fischers. Phylis, Roger and their two children, teenager Collette and nine year old Hugh. Roger works at the foreign office whilst Phylis is a housewife. They live an idyllic life in a gorgeous home.

When the Fischers invite a twenty year old son of an old friend to their dinner party, their suburban bubble is about to burst.

Phylis and the young man Nicholas Knight exchange a passionate kiss whilst out in the garden. This incident triggers a sexual awakening and she abandons bourgeois comfort for a covert affair. Phylis makes a decision which will change all of her family's lives forever.

Along the way we see the fall out in her family and there is a huge revelation which I definitely was not expecting.

This is my first Hadley novel that I have read and will not be my last.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

Hadley writes beautifully, with a deceptively light touch about relationships and life at a crossroads. A great novel for those who enjoy the accessibility of commercial fiction with a literary edge.

I have been desperate to enjoy Tessa’s books as much as so many others. I’ve read a couple but never really been able to find anything to grab hold of. Well, I was in luck with Free Love as I adored this: a tender, bittersweet portrayal of a middle-aged woman – a wife and a mother – taking a chance on a rash love affair and the hope of freedom.

We are in 1967. The 60s are rapidly becoming the 70s and free love is the order of the day. All this should appeal to the teenage Colette who is the ever-so typically sullen teenager on the cusp of leaving school. But instead, Tessa focuses in on the mother, Phyllis, a woman whose suburban residence, wardrobe and family life seem stuck in the 50s.

When a young man comes to dinner, it is Phyllis not Collette whose life is turned upside down. She sees her life as half-lived, repressed, and ill-informed and chooses instead to walk out on her responsibilities and even duty for a life in bohemian London.

It is this decision by Tessa to reframe the Swinging Sixties as coming in too late for the previous generation of women that gives this novel its heart. Phyllis is a woman who wants to cling desperately to the hope that it isn’t too late for her, that she too can have her sexual and political freedom. But, of course, when you are a mother and wife, it is more complicated.

Tessa’s writing on the interiority of all the characters is sublime. The focus she gives to all the longings and missed opportunities in her cast, as well as the awkwardness and false dawn of female liberation.
The supporting cast are as beautifully drawn as Phyllis. Her husband, Roger, is surprising and appropriate, whilst Tessa’s handling of the repercussions for Phyllis’s two children, Colette and Hugh is smartly done. This is a beautiful and affecting read and, for book clubs especially, there is so much to pull out and examine here on motivations, repercussions, and responsibility.

This is the second Tessa Hadley novel I've read and I adored it.
It's 1967 and Phyllis Fischer is married to Roger and has two children, Colette and Hugh. When Nick, a twenty something family friend comes for dinner Phyllis is drawn to him and soon makes a life changing decision.
This is a beautifully written and insightful novel that I was completely immersed in. The writing is understated and subtle and yet really brings to life the characters and their repressed emotions. It is an atmospheric read, beautifully portraying the 1960s and the attitudes of the time. It is thought provoking and I did have strong views about Phyllis and her actions. A novel that will really stay with me and I'd highly recommend it.
4.5 stars
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.

After years of reading rave reviews of Tessa Hadley’s work, I’m wondering why it took me so long to read Free Love. This is an immersive novel, told with such skill that it’s hard to believe the characters have not lived and breathed. The plot wraps itself around you in a subtle way, and I found myself having moments of realisation and clarity along with the characters. I loved how Tessa created a sense of time, in terms of sensibility and of era as she explored the conflict of values and appearance and an understanding of what it means (and costs) to be happy. The west London setting added to my enjoyment as I have lived and worked there. Highly recommended.

This is a beautifully-written story of Phyllis, a 1960s housewife in suburban London. At a dinner for her friend’s son, she steals an elicit kiss with him - Nicky (whilst searching for a neighbour’s son’s sandal in a pond) - and this sets off a life-changing series of events for Phyl and her family.

At the beginning of the story, there is a focus on Colette and Hugh, quite different children, and Phyl’s husband, Roger. Later, it is clear that her behaviour triggers significant changes for the family, particularly for Colette who becomes rebellious . When Phyl leaves her comfortable life behind on a whim, she heads to London to track down Nicky and so begins her new life - one without structure, comforts and security.

This is a story about one woman’s quest to change her life - and change it she does. Adding fuel to the fire is becoming pregnant and having baby Michael, and finding out a long-hidden truth about Roger, Nicky’s mother, Jean, and Nicky himself. Superb in many ways, this novel shows the lengths people will go to in order to obtain happiness.

Free Love by Tessa Hadley takes place in the sixties and follows a respectable housewife who embarks on an affair that turns her life upside down.

Nothing Free About It

After seeing this title on a few end of year Top Fiction Reads for 2022, this was one of the first books I chose, to get back into the reading rhythm. Perhaps for that reason, it took a little while to get into, but once it reached the first significant turning point, the plot became more interesting and surprising and the choices the author made, much more thought provoking. It would make an excellent book club choice.

In essence, 40 year old Phyllis – who was living a conventional life as a housewife with two children, her husband Roger working at the Foreign Office – steps out of the submissive role she has been wed to, when a friends’ son comes to visit. Prior to this moment she hadn’t appeared to be frustrated with her life.

“In fact she was easy, an easy person, easily made happy, glad to make others happy. She was pleased with her life. The year was 1967.”

The encounter leads to numerous consequences, increasingly dramatic, that will affect everyone in the family. Our housewife leaves her middle class, manicured English lawn suburb for a rundown, seedy apartment building in Ladbroke Grove, teeming with diversity, creativity, and people living in the moment.

A Housewife Acting on a Crazy Impulse. Really?

In the initial chapters, it was difficult to believe. Every reader will bring to their reading of the story, their own imagining of how this mother could abandon all for something that feels like it will be fleeting.

But then you slowly accept it, recalling the era in which it was set, knowing there was a whole other way of living and being in the 1960’s, a revolution against convention and authority, a risk taking utopian fever spreading its tentacles among the young and not so young.

Colette, Not Yet Colette

The teenage daughter Colette is the more tortured soul, an astute observer, a lonely intellectual who read everything, though refused to read the novelist her mother said she was named after.

“Her father’s intelligence was so much stronger than her mother’s, Colette thought; yet it was the slippery labyrinth of her mother’s mind – illogical, working through self-suggestion and hunches according to her hidden purposes – which was closed to Colette, and therefore more dangerous for her.”

While we may feel sorry for the children – the son was always going to be sent away to boarding school, an interesting juxtaposition, to set side by side, twin forms of abandonment – it is interesting to see how the relationship between mother and daughter evolves under the new circumstance of their lives.

Colette starts skipping school.

“When she got to London Bridge she put her satchel and uniform in a left-luggage locker. All she did in the city was walk around in the crowds, pretending to be absorbed and purposeful like everyone else. She went to browse in certain bookshops, in Carnaby Street she bought tinted sunglasses, underground magazines and cones of incense from stuffy little shops, also henna to dye her hair at home. Sometimes she screwed up her courage to ask for a glass of barley wine in a pub, then sat alone defiantly to drink, reading.”

Honesty versus Secrecy

It was interesting to imagine a conventional housewife having such courage or impulsivity to do what she did. The choices Phyllis makes are surprising and daring, and just when we think she is the only one capable of making such counter conventional choices, there is another twist in the story.

It becomes a story about consequences, those that are dared lived out in the open, versus those that have been hidden. Then it gets really interesting. It makes you wonder, should those secrets be kept or shared? One can never predict the consequences of either route, but this story attempts to pit one against the other.

It reminded me of the experience of reading Brian Moore’s The Doctor’s Wife.

Coming Full Circle

The ending is more poignant than conclusive, it reiterates the messiness of real lives and the power of forgiveness, the benefit of setting aside judgement, of being true to oneself without having to reject the other.

“Phyllis had been braced to defend herself against her husband. On her way to meet him, she’d summoned an idea of his authority, implacable and punitive, mixed up with his role in the world of Establishment power. Now she was taken aback by how he bent his head before her, opening himself so easily; his kindness drew one sob out of everything loosened and raw inside her.”

An enjoyable and thought provoking read ad an author I’d be happy to read more of.

I liked the authors wtiting style in this enjoyable book which gave an interesting new twist on London in the swinging 60s. Why should the young have all the fun?

Free Love is a wise, insightful novel about a women who decides to leave her family for a younger lover and the repercussions of this.

It is 1967 and 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer is married to Roger, a kindly civil servant at the Foreign Office, with two children. When we first meet Phyllis, she appears content with her comfortable life, but an encounter with young bohemian Nicky Knight awakens in her a longing for more. Over the following months she embroils herself not only in an affair with Nicky but also in the world of 1960s counter-culture. Phyllis's choice will have profound consequences not just for herself and Nicky but also for her whole family.

This is an extremely well-written and well-plotted novel, and all the main characters are sympathetically drawn as they respond to the upheaval they are facing, both in their own personal lives and in society as a whole. Tessa Hadley's evocation of the late 1960s is convincing and immersive without ever feeling like it is trying too hard. The end of the novel becomes a rather moving reflection on missed opportunities in a changing world.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC of this excellent novel to review.

When Phyllis allows herself to kiss a young man she remembers a part of herself long buried. As she returns to herself she finds life peppered with much more interesting characters. Hadley writes with such understanding of human nature. Each person’s understanding of the world varied and justified from their own perspective.
An interesting history of social practices and attitudes at this time.

A good bit of a different read that set up an interesting tale. Didn’t see coming some of the plot twists. We’ll written would recommend

Phyllis Fischer is a middle-class housewife living in 1960s suburban London. Seemingly content with her Foreign Office husband, five o’clock gins and formica countertops, a clumsy kiss with a young dinner guest initially seems like nothing more than drunken silliness. However, the encounter stirs something in Phyllis and she soon trades domesticity for Notting Hill’s hippy scene. Gently witty and effortlessly enjoyable, this is a wonderful book about desire and self-discovery. I began Free Love on a glum Saturday when my husband tested positive for Covid. Not only was Tessa Hadley’s novel the irresistibly entertaining read I needed to distract me from our cancelled plans, it was a kind one, too. Hadley writes her characters with such warmth, that I was deeply fond of Phyllis by the end of the novel.