"[A] brilliantly observed novel." - People, Pick of the Week "Free Love is beautifully structured and brilliantly paced. It displays Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive. Phyllis Fischer's quest for love and escape is created with drama and excitement, but also with slow care and real delicacy and sympathy." - Colm Tóibín "Free Love is a perfect example of the Tessa Hadley problem: her books are so easy on the eye, such a joy to read, it's possible to forget how artful, profound and subtle they are-and what a great writer she is. " - Geoff Dyer "Every book Tessa Hadley writes makes her readers look forward keenly to the next. Free Love is a beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate." - Hilary Mantel "In keen, lush prose, Hadley conveys the many ways her characters delude themselves amid fraught relationships between parents and children as well as between lovers.
The result is sumptuous and surprising." - Publishers Weekly, starred review "Think The Graduate told from Mrs. Robinson's point of view. Hadley's indelible portrait of a woman defying conventions in pursuit of personal fulfillment flawlessly captures a signature time with timeless sensitivity and passion." - Booklist, starred review "A tragicomic exploration of how one woman's erotic awakening revolutionizes her sense of who she is, what she must do and what that will cost." - Ron Charles, Washington Post "Hadley's poignant drawing together of a situation that ultimately becomes 'as fatally twisted as a Greek drama' shows a writer with boundless compassion. Yet again, she offers insightful and sensitive understanding of the quiet compromises people make to survive in a deeply compromised world." - Guardian (UK) "A superb portraitist, rendering people with the tiniest of details .
[and] a sumptuous stylist, Hadley is a writer for whom language trumps all else. Any publication of hers, whether of short or long fiction, is cause for celebration for the pure pleasure of the prose." - Financial Times "A deceptively expansive novel, filled with idiosyncratic characters and a distinctive flavor of the times. A domestic novel of manners, erotic abandon, and cultural change, Free Love is as eclectic and alive as the time it captures." - NPR's Fresh Air "Tessa Hadley has few rivals in portraying the dynamics of families and the intricate weave of emotional affiliations among members. She is a genius at capturing fugitive thoughts and memories, the propulsive energy of desire, and the provisional reasoning that constitute inner being. Free Love is a penetrating, extraordinarily subtle novel about an unsubtle era." - Wall Street Journal "Exquisite and sensuous prose.
The stories of break and repair in this novel are wonderfully unpredictable." - Minneapolis Star Tribune "Hadley's arresting novel offers a backward glance that helps show us a way forward" - Los Angeles Times "Free Love is a fresh, moving evocation of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius." - NPR.