The Party is a thoughtful and emotional exploration of sisterly relationships and misplaced desire. It is a short but powerful story, looking at youthful desire and the fickle nature of people. Whilst not long enough to be truly engaging for me, ending before I had a real chance to connect with any of the characters, it was a well written novella and I enjoyed the story.

An enjoyable novella that I read in one afternoon. Hadley has a way of making the ordinary extra ordinary. Really enjoyed her writing in this.
A story of two sisters and two parties they attend, meeting men that are not suitable for them. Set in post war Bristol.

This novella follows sisters Moira and Evelyn as they sneak off to a party in post-war Bristol. There, they meet two men and it is clear there's a class division. Packed with lovely 'full' descriptions, I felt there was an unnecessary use of almost archaic language and French inserts. Was this to create an obvious class divide and commentary? It took me out of the scene. There's an interesting and too-deliberate commentary on class, religion, family and aspiration here, but it's lost amongst vapid and hollow characters who are fairly dull upon examination.

Two sisters in post-war Bristol try to navigate the class divide of studying art and French while living at home with their parents. Hadley’s storytelling feels safe and comforting, and I did love this, although the ending was a little bit on the farcical side like a good episode of Frasier.

Evelyn and her older sister, Moira in post-war, working class Bristol try out relationships. This subtle story looks at the culture clash of class - both girls are attracted but also repelled by men they meet. We follow the story from Evelyn's point of view as she's introduced to the adult world of alcohol and sex by her more worldly sister.

Tessa Hadley, whose writing I always love, has written a novella that captures the intense feelings of that liminal space where, as it seems to the sisters, they can experiment and try out new experiences, and nothing really matters but the joy of it all. Excellent.

A wonderful novella from Tessa Hadley, beautifully evocative of time and place. Although part of me would have liked it to be longer as the characters were ones I would happily have spent more time with, it actually is a perfect thing, that I will probably reread and definitely recommend.

After revisiting sexual relationships in the swinging 60s in Free Love, Tessa Hadley is looking back to the 1950s in her latest novella, The Party. It is called a novella simply because it is too short to be called a novel and too long for a short story!

Not to put too fine a point on it, the book tastefully (well, mostly) recounts the defloration of two gauche young sisters, Moira and Evelyn, by a sleazeball called Sinden at a party in a posh house, attended by some second-rate arty Bohemian people, and a few with money.

The sisters are bored with their family lives in suburban Bristol and attracted to art-school type Vincent and his parties. It’s all very mild stuff! Gin and Orange rather than drugs, jazz not rock, and bad dancing but the sisters have not been brought up to encounter and deal with the modern world, and life at home is full of dishonesty and evasions. Given a few drinks and their desire to find out what life is really all about, the loss of virginity, even as it is charmless, is inevitable.

You can start off thinking that maybe this is a bit autobiographical, as well as thinking that Tessa Hadley might be considered too old for that sort of smut but there’s more to it than that. It’s actually a fairly vicious critique of middle-class upbringing in the post-war years and the closed society of the nuclear family. Moira and Evelyn might consider themselves lucky that nothing worse happened to them!

Maybe it is also something to do with showing how the ‘Me-Too’ generation evolved or, perhaps, failed to learn about sex and relationships, sex and money and sex and exploitation just as their parents did. You can imagine Moira, a few years on, delighted that her young daughter has got a part-time job at Harrods!

Anyway, it is an interesting read, short but not insubstantial!

Such a beautiful cover, the book is very descriptive and immersive, you certainly feel like you are alongside the sisters as they weave their way to both social gatherings. I found I wasn't drawn in enough to care very much about any of the characters, which is a shame but as observational writing it is fascinating.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

"Only yesterday she had been an irrelevant child; how amazing to find herself now at life's code, the object of such brusque, blind, heedless, hungry pursuit, as if nothing else in the world mattered".

Tessa Hadley's novella The Party is split in two halves, the first detailing a party in a pub that naive, dreamy Evelyn sneaks out to to join her worldly older sister Moira at, and the second which deals with the aftermath. I say aftermath like something huge and dramatic happens, but rather this party allows Evelyn to draw a curtain back and start to experience adult life for the first time, which feels huge and dramatic for her. She and her sister, though in very different ways, want something to happen - an antidote to the powerlessness they both seem to feel in their own different ways, but never acknowledge.

The book is about access, in a lot of ways. Evelyn gains access to the world of grown women and, even more importantly to her, men, in this book, but we also see how people from different backgrounds come together at this would be bohemian gathering - Evelyn notes that the men can move between class and cultures somewhat more easily than she can. She feels very much an outsider looking in at much more interesting people, while also feeling a terrifying pull in another direction to what her life could be - her dejected, scorned mother or the lonely, frail old woman she calls to see.

Something I loved about this book is how it seems so simple, but there are moments of very careful and deliberate projecting of the narrative voice to somewhere in the future. It's mostly narrated pretty closely in the third person, but the reader seems to get glimpses of the older Evelyn looking back, or the current Evelyn predicting how she will look back on these moments, and this mirroring or doubling of herself in her own mind is such an interesting way of writing a character who does not yet know who she is becoming.

The Party is a convincing, if somewhat depressing, portrait of an intelligent girl on the cusp of adulthood just as the nineteen fifties are coming to a close. Intensely aware of the winds of change beginning to blow through the class-bound society in which she finds herself, Evelyn is determined to seek out new experiences at the house party to which her older sister has brought her; but is she simply allowing to herself to be used by the affluent and cynical older man who has taken a fancy to her?

There are times when I feel the reader is told too much about what Evelyn and her sister are thinking, leaving too little to the imagination. Nonetheless, Tessa Hadley’s writing is tremendously evocative of the period and you feel immersed in Evelyn’s world, sharing her frustrations and her longing for meaningful encounters.

A novella about two sisters who go to a party and meet some boys. The message of the story seems to be ‘it’s okay if men treat us badly because it makes us appear desirable and mysterious.’ Besides enjoying the sisterly relationship between the two protagonists, I have little positive to say about this book.

I was sent a copy of The Party by Tessa Hadley to read and review by NetGalley. What a delightful novella! I loved the sisters at the heart of the story, with their wish to escape and be different to their parents. The atmosphere throughout the book was perfect and the characters utterly believable. I love the fact that this was a novella, but I do hope that the author will write about Evelyn and Moira again. A definite 5 stars from me!

A novella set in postwar Bristol about two sisters who go to a party at an old dockside pub where they meet a couple of upper class men. I read this novella in two sittings, it’s a coming of age story for both sisters with the post war atmosphere, their family problems (Dad has a woman on the side) and the obvious class differences setting the scene. I enjoyed the read.

I am always tempted to rush through a novella in one sitting, but there is so much to “The Party” that I had to take it easy, reading it over several days.

Yet again, Tessa Hadley has perfectly captured the vibe of an era that I remember well, and in which she wasn’t even alive, although I understand that her family lived in post-war Bristol, the setting for this novella.

The two main protagonists are late teen/ young adult sisters from a lower middle class family both on the cusp of maturity, full of pre-60s repression and class consciousness, looking for excitement and also, I think, wondering if they might be able to step up in the world longer term. This is a coming of age book which I found quite dark. It would be an ideal book club read, guaranteed to generate some interesting discussions.

With some writers, novellas are a godsend. An amuse bouche to see whether or not you'll enjoy a writer's style, storytelling ability, general vibes etc. 'The Party' was exactly that for me - a chance to see if I'd enjoy Tessa Hadley as an author. And I finished this with an amicable conclusion of 'yeah, this probably isn't for me'. Nothing on the author! But our personalities are not compatible. Like a savoury muffin, I'm glad I tried it, but I won't be returning.

I think my core issue with this novella is I kept waiting for something of significance to happen and then it just...didn't. There's a brief glimmer of hope, but it's literally in the last ten pages. 'The Party' feels like a bar of soap made from slivers of other soaps - lots of different ideas, cobbled together, never quite developed enough to create a cohesive story. Now, maybe I'm just not smart enough to read between the lines of the book. Maybe I'm missing something, I don't know. But it just felt like this concept needed more time to bake.

'The Party' is a superb novella which brilliantly captures the social and sexual mores of post-war bohemian Bristol.

Evelyn and her older sister Moira are students who still live with their parents; their father is a naval officer whose affair with another woman is known by the whole family but not openly discussed. One Saturday night, Evelyn joins Moira and her fellow art students at a party at a run-down dockside pub. They also meet two other men, Paul and Sinden, who have seemingly been invited in off the street and come from a different world. Their suave manner is both appealing and offputting to the sisters. The following Wednesday, Moira receives a phone call from Sinden inviting them to the mansion Paul shares with his siblings: it is this night which will mark a rite of passage for both sisters.

Tessa Hadley is highly regarded as both a novelist and a short story writer, but here also proves her mastery of the novella form: this narrative allows space to flesh out the world she is describing whilst still retaining an economy of style, focusing on just three separate days over the course of a week during which everything changes for Evelyn and Moira. The novella has so many wonderful observations: early on, Hadley captures the thrill of bohemianism for the mostly middle-class students: 'It was a bit thing among the art students, to want to mingle across those boundaries of class their parents were so intent upon policing: the mothers putting doilies on the cake-plate as if respectability depended upon it, objecting to milk or ketchup bottles on the table, ironing handkerchiefs and socks and dusters.' I also loved the description of how Evelyn's 'scruffy self was her reading self. To lose herself properly in a book she had to be crumped and snug, oblivious of her appearance, scrunched up in an armchair with her shoes off and her legs tucked under her. When she was really reading, she forgot who she was.' Later on, 'Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them', an insight which Hadley then undercuts by remarking that 'she'd have liked to impress somebody with this idea.'

This is a short read but one which will remain with the reader for a long time. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, nearing adulthood, attend an art students' party at a dockside pub. There, they encounter the worldly Paul and Sinden, whose sophistication intrigues yet unsettles them. After Sinden invites them to Paul's grand suburban mansion, Moira accepts despite Evelyn's concerns. As the night progresses in this glamorous setting, the sisters discover surprising truths about themselves and each other, propelling them into a new phase of their lives.

This short story, though brief, leaves a lasting impact with its poignant exploration of young adulthood's complexities, triumphs, and tragedies. The author skillfully packs rich detail into a concise narrative. I appreciated the distinct personalities of the main characters, which drive the story forward. Set against the backdrop of post-war Bristol, the writing vividly illustrates the societal expectations for men and women within a class system, adding depth to the narrative.

I really enjoyed Tessa Hadley’s Free Love when it was published a couple of years ago, and went on to read her excellent Late in the Day, so when offered the chance to read her new novella I snapped it up. The Party’s first chapter (of three) was originally published as a short story in the New Yorker and is, as that would suggest, beautifully self-contained. Evelyn, a first-year university student longing for adulthood, heads out one Saturday evening to a run-down pub on the Bristol docks to celebrate the birthday of Vincent, an art school friend of her older sister Moira. They drink, dance and circulate, then sneak out of the fire escape to avoid the attentions of poshos Paul and Sinden who are intent on whisking them off into the night in a Bentley.
This set-up whets the appetite for what is to follow: an interlude in which the sisters spend the day in a more mundane fashion: one teaching at Sunday school, both visiting an elderly woman, then returning home to a taut atmosphere and lunch.
It’s not the first party that turns out to be the more interesting though; that honour goes to the soirée the sisters are taken to by Sinden a couple of days later. Paul lives with his siblings and cousin in a grand but chaotic and slightly run-down house they’ve recently inherited. An initially awkward gathering is loosened with the liberal application of drinks and by the following morning the world looks very different. Over a few days in winter, Evelyn encounters all sides of what Bristol has to offer and has her eyes opened to some astonishing people and behaviour. Adulthood may well have arrived.

This is a perfect cameo of two sisters, Moira and Evelyn, finding their way in 1960s Bristol. Nothing much happens, the girls meet people, go to parties. and then at one house party have a shared and significant experience. The relationships between the girls, their family and the people they meet is sketched out delicately with a very fine touch, and although nothing much is said, much is understood. Lovely.

Personally, character driven storylines will always be my favourite. I cherish getting to properly delve into different characters and feel like I truly know them inside out. The Party does exactly this. Young adulthood is in the heart of life's chaos, and through this you get to know exactly who these characters are, even whilst they are trying to understand this for themselves. Though these women adopt a rather turbulent navigation strategy, you understand the methods behind their madness, possibly before even they do themselves.


I don't want to give too much away, but this was such a fast read! I was too engrossed in their lives!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Penguin for the e-ARC!