Dan Barrett

The reprinting of Tony and Susan has been described as the return of a modern classic—the book was first released in 1993.

The novel’s premise is unusual: A woman, Susan, has received a draft of a novel from Edward, a man she once briefly called her husband. Edward wanted to be a writer even when married to Susan, but it’s only now—long after their divorce—that he has realized his dream.

As Susan reads, she is awed by the skillful, harrowing story—a story that real-world readers of Tony and Susan will encounter in its entirety. It’s about a man, Tony, whose wife and daughter are abducted by some menacing men in the middle of the road. And as Tony copes with the aftermath of this violent incident, Susan copes with the memories of her dead marriage and the realities of her current domestic situation. Susan and Tony seem to speak to one another, the way any attentive reader feels that he is speaking with the characters on the page.

Tony and Susan accomplishes many difficult tasks. For example, Susan grows from a nonentity to something like a complex, living, breathing human being. Also, Tony’s situation in the manuscript subtly and plausibly sheds light on Susan’s predicament. Though Susan isn’t fighting for her life or seeking bloody revenge, she is deeply dissatisfied with some of her choices, and Edward’s tale forces her to confront some skeletons in her own closet. Readers may find themselves repeatedly thinking of David Mamet’s plays, which are similarly playful in their use of language and attuned to the darkness that runs alongside just about any simple, civil human encounter.

It’s impressive that Wright has invented such a bold structure for a novel, and that he has found a way to draw us so skillfully into not one, but two fictional worlds.

The London Train, Tessa Hadley’s elegant novel, tells two linked stories. In the first half, a middle-aged man, Paul, goes on a journey. His daughter from his first marriage, Pia, is pregnant—and living with some disreputable people. Paul imagines he might save Pia, but as he considers how unhappy he is in his own current domestic situation, he decides he might take a page from his daughter’s book. He lives with her for a while. When he snaps to his senses and returns to his marriage and his bourgeois life, he must decide if he can resume being the person he once was.

Then, in the second half, a woman named Cora struggles with some weighty problems of her own. Most pressing: Her estranged husband has gone missing. It emerges that Cora once had an affair with Paul, the man from the first half of the book, and this is why she is now separated from her husband, Robert. As she searches for Robert, she thinks about her (now-defunct) affair and about the wreckage of her marriage. She wonders if maybe she doesn’t want to be divorced after all.

Throughout both halves of the novel, Hadley’s literary talents are on display. She takes great care to describe the irrational ways in which people behave—especially the way in which a person’s train of thought can get derailed when that person spends too much time on his or her own. She notices how comically hypocritical people can be when they give advice, and notes how a person can become exhausted by inhabiting a slightly false personality. It’s clear that Hadley loves and closely watches the people around her, and that she has a real gift for explaining how the mind works.

Fans of Hadley’s absorbing New Yorker stories won’t want to miss The London Train. And anyone who is unfamiliar with her work but enjoys the graceful prose and psychological insight of Roxana Robinson or Penelope Lively should pick up a copy of this paperback original.