Tessa Hadley

“The most extraordinary and best of the stories in Gilead are to do with the quarrels Ames remembers between his father and grandfather; these are the hub of the novel’s arguments about the transforming power of religious faith. The grandfather was a passionate abolitionist, ‘afire with old certainties’, who fought alongside John Brown; he is another one of those disturbing innocents, impossible to live with and yet leaving the mark of his intensity on everyone he touches. When he was 16 he had a vision of the Lord in irons, holding out his arms to him, and knew he had to go to Kansas, where they were voting whether to enter the Union slave or free; he pitied his son, who was temporising and reasonable: ‘That’s just what kills my heart . . . That the Lord never came to you. That the seraphim never touched a coal to your lips.’”

We’re encouraged by the Romantics and the Freudians to think that childhood is when we are most ‘natural’ and least broken-in to cultural norms. However, in childhood we are also most intensely subject to the familial culture which surrounds us; the world can be interpreted only in the language and according to the value system we are given by parents and relatives and at...

The world of Kate Atkinson’s novels is distinctive. This isn’t because it’s confined to a particular place (Behind the Scenes at the Museum, 1995, her first novel, was set in York, her others in ‘Arden’, Dundee and Cambridge), although geography is important, and she is precise about history, socio-economics, climate, architecture and even street-plans....

At the beginning of her short story ‘Jakarta’, Alice Munro describes two young women who choose a spot on a beach because it’s sheltered and because ‘they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call these women the Monicas.’ The Monicas have two or three or four children apiece; they build a temporary domestic encampment on the...