The year is 1967 and 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer is sitting at her dressing table applying lipstick ahead of an informal dinner she is hosting for the son of a family friend. Phyllis is married to Roger, a senior civil servant, with whom she has two children, Colette and Hugh, and is regarded as “an easy person. Easily made happy, glad to make others happy. She was pleased with her life.” And yet her comfortable commuter-belt existence is upended with the arrival of their dinner guest, Nicholas, a young socialist and would-be reporter whom she kisses in a moment of impulsiveness while searching for a missing shoe in the garden. Startled by her own boldness, Phyllis later tracks Nicholas down to a flat in west London where she encounters bohemian types who smoke pot, sleep around and argue about politics, and where she undergoes her own political and sexual awakening.
Tessa Hadley’s eighth novel delves beneath the veneer of British suburbia to tell an intimate and gripping story of generational discord and female self-discovery. The actor Abigail Thaw is the narrator, her cut-glass delivery aptly reflecting Phyllis’s middle-class background and her innate brittleness that gradually falls away as she casts aside her safe yet sheltered life. Hadley’s masterstroke here lies in her refusal to present Phyllis either as a hero or villain, instead leaving us to ponder the implications of her actions and to digest one of the biggest and most unfair taboos: that of a woman leaving her children in pursuit of personal fulfilment.
• Free Love by Tessa Hadley is available from Penguin Audio, 9hr and 1min
Further listening
The Trials of Life
David Attenborough, William Collins, 10 hr
The third and final updated edition of the acclaimed Life trilogy examines animal behaviour, with Attenborough bringing his customary gravitas and sense of wonder.
Cat Lady
Dawn O’Porter, HarperCollins, 7hr 37min
The actor Daisy Haggard reads this tale about Mia, a married woman who isn’t living the life she had hoped and who finds solace in a pet bereavement group despite her cat, Pigeon, being alive and well.
