comment on language / style

Tessa Hadley is an author that excels at depicting nuances of a character's inner, emotional world, and her use of figurative and expressive language is a significant tool used for that purpose. The characters in this novel are contending with grief, betrayal, disappointment, and other complex feelings, and Hadley illuminates their emotional responses in precise detail. For example, while waiting for Alex to return home after taking Grace back to Glasgow, the narrator says of Christine, “Her perception was a skin stretched taut, prickling with response to each change in the light outside as it ran through the drama of its sunset performance at the end of the street in a mass of gilded pink” (125). Not only does this capture Christine's anxiety and anticipation exactly, but it is also a vivid and poetic description of the sunset. After Alex has begun his affair with Lydia, Christine's mood is slightly uplifted by her decision that, no matter what, she would be keeping the house: “she was almost pleased, picking up objects in the rooms and putting them down again, straightening pictures, admiring the rich accumulation of interesting things as if she'd just come into some inheritance” (178).