Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel

When Joyce Stevenson is thirteen, her family moves to the south of England to live with their aunt Vera. Vera and her sister Lil aren't at all alike. Vera, a teacher, has unquestioning belief in the powers of education and reason; Lil puts her faith in seances. Joyce is determined to be different: she falls in love with art (and her art teacher). Spanning five decades of extraordinary change in women's lives, Tessa Hadley's Everything Will Be All Right explores the tangled history of one family and the disasters, hopes, compromises, and ambitions of successive generations.