“at once a melancholy and delightful story… Hadley's twin narratives are perfectly tuned and heavy with lacerating observations about the way fate works.”
---- PW
“darkly elegant … Hadley writes with grace and intensity, moving from careful, beautiful delineation of character and place […] to moments of haunting power … The whole is tinged with an elegiac sense of ambiguity … [W]hat Hadley has done is open a Pandora’s box: all the troubles of the world fall upon these people – and at the end there still remains hope.”
---- Financial Times
“What’s so rewarding about Hadley’s fiction: how she in points those unsettling moments which occur in everyday life and creates characters who outwardly appear to conform to a distinct personality type, only to twist- suddenly or subtly- against the reader’s expectations… I loved the realistic way in which they became different people in different contexts- something that doesn’t happen often enough in fiction. Hadley has also created an excellent (and equally foxing) supporting cast… The elegant symmetry beneath THE LONDON TRAIN keeps the randomness of the personalities on some kind of track. And although this is not a novel to suit those who like all their narratives to roll nearly into the buffers, it offers some first-class views on the psychological scenery of 21st-century Britain.”
----Telegraph
“There is something reassuring yet deliciously unexpected about a Tessa Hadley novel… Hadley is particularly adept at portraying a certain type of grown-up angst… Her balancing of contemporary issues and the life of the mind faultless.”
---- Catherine Taylor, Sunday Telegraph
“She has a well-established gift for social observation, working by accretion rather than grand statement, and this novel contains many finely turned moments.”
---- Alex Clark, TLS
“The novel is a triumph of form, gathering depth as the meaning of the second story, about Cora, develops in light of the first, about Paul.”
---- Ti Sperlinger, Independent on Sunday
“Tessa Hadley is an understated writer whose concentration on the details of everyday life belies a breathtaking acuity and articulateness. Her previous three novels and collection of stories were met with praise for her brush-strokes...In THE LONDON TRAIN, she once again visualises the monochrome mundanity of ordinary existence in glorious Technicolor.... Hadley captures shades of almost imperceptible grey that the reader only recognises after reading... Hadley shows, with dizzying aplomb, that the distinction between "literary" fiction and the best domestic fiction is spurious.”
---- Independent
“admirably concise and attentively detailed.”
----Peter Parker, Sunday Times
“The plot is nothing out of the ordinary, but the way she tells it is remarkable – so much so that you feel you’re observing the lives of real people… The two halves of this novel are beautifully woven together; place bets now for the Orange prize.”
----The Times
“By far the most interesting feature of Tessa Hadley’s carefully sculpted novel is the way she enters so completely into her characters’ private worlds of thought and action. The minds of Paul and Cora are so fully occupied by this most astute and sympathetic of writers, that the reader hardly questions their weirdest and least wise moves.”
---- Susanna Rustin, Guardian Review
“Is this a proper novel with a cohesive narrative or two separate interrelated stories? Probably the latter, but whatever, it’s an excellent, absorbing read.”
---- Daily Mail
“Tessa Hadley again demonstrates her skill at amplifying the details of lives.”
---- Metro
“Tessa Hadley’s reputation as a writer has soared lately. Her new novel THE LONDON TRAIN shows why.”
---- Conde Nast Traveller
“beautifully written and utterly absorbing, driven by a subtle, infectious curiosity about its characters and the sense they try to make of their lives.”
----The Lady