Stupidly, and for no discernable reason, I had thought that I wouldn’t enjoy Tessa Hadley’s short fiction. Then I read this story in the anthology Reverse Engineering II, a collection of seven contemporary stories coupled with author interviews, and I realised I had been mistaken: Tessa Hadley is a masterful story writer. The first half of ‘Bad Dreams’ is in the mind of a young girl, waking at night in her family home after a bad dream. The second half is told from the point of view of her mother who wakes later in the night. I won’t say more but it’s poignant – nay, heartbreaking – stuff. Hadley’s canvas is small but she gives us a whole world. I now intend to read everything Tessa Hadley has ever written.
First published in The New Yorker, 2013 and available to read online here. Collected in Bad Dreams, Vintage, 2018 and also in Reverse Engineering II, Scratch Books, 2022
A Personal Anthology 