Tessa Hadley and Rachel Joyce talk to Stephanie Merritt

Novelists Tessa Hadley and Rachel Joyce discuss their new work about sibling relationships and the hairline cracks that can appear in them, with critic and author Stephanie Merritt.

Hadley introduces her new novella The Party, which sees sisters Moira and Evelyn on the cusp of adulthood. When they meet two men with an intriguing air of sophistication, and are invited to a party, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them. Hadley is a winner of the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

In Joyce’s The Homemade God, family is everything – but as Goose and his three sisters search for answers about the death of their famous artist father, the things they learn about themselves, him and their new stepmother drive them apart before they can figure out his legacy. Joyce is author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film in 2023.