Married Love and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley: review Married Love and Other Stories, Tessa Hadley's latest book, could more accurately be described as a concentration, not a collection, of short fiction. The stories here are, in effect, a dozen novels in miniature, frequently featuring as many characters over as many pages, often with complex back stories or ranging across a long period of time. In "A Mouthful of Cut Glass," Hadley contrasts Brummie Neil, the son of a tool setter, with Sheila, a vicar's daughter from Suffolk. Though the setting is only 1972, when Neil takes Sheila home to meet his parents in "the shoebox-shaped" living room that was a "little gem of neatness," or when Sheila later takes Neil to meet her "awful" parents at the cold, scuffed Rectory, we may as well be back in the world of Sons and Lovers. Sheila is sick with thwarted longing for Neil, in whom she sees some kind of intellectual authenticity. Yet, once he is on Sheila's home turf and hopelessly out of his depth in a game of charades, she regains the upper hand. The story culminates in an atavistic scene in which Sheila vents her frustrations by hurling apples at a bewildered Neil. Also Lawrentian is the notion of a single transcendent moment in which allegiances shift. For Julie in "In the Country," that moment comes at her mother-in-law's 60th birthday party when, at an oak table under a tree, the mood turns decadent and theatrical. When Julie's husband reins her in unnecessarily, his reproach leads her to realign herself, with lasting consequences, to the only other outsider at the party. In another story, "In the Cave," Linda has just slept with her internet date for the first and last time. A divorced academic in a flat with books piled everywhere, he had seemed so promising, and Linda had been so moved by his work on the caves of Lascaux. Yet once he has explained the magical hallucinations of the cave painters as a mere trick of the mind, Linda experiences a fatal drop in her hopes: "How small. Just that. One of those tiny twitches in conversation that, unbeknownst to the speaker, tear fissures in the moment, out of which power and pleasure drain. Not something that can be said of Hadley. Married Love and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley 231pp, Jonathan Cape t £12.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £14.99, ebook £8.99)