AFTER THE FUNERAL

Families come in many varieties, all of them equally fraught, in a dozen new stories from British writer Hadley.

Feckless bohemian parents get withering portraits in “My Mother’s Wedding” (not her first, needless to say) and “Funny Little Snake”; the latter is a particularly poignant tale of a neglected 9-year-old girl and a second wife who reluctantly comes to feel responsible for her. These two stories, like many in the collection, stop rather than end with people poised on the brink of change and no guarantees things will turn out well. Hadley’s work, very much in the realistic tradition of classic English fiction, is old-fashioned in the best sense: Characters’ personalities and backstories are fully drawn and set against thickly detailed physical and social surroundings. The childhood home where three middle-aged sisters assemble to visit their hospitalized mother in “The Bunty Club” is “a stolid Victorian villa” set on a hillside dotted with houses “intended to accommodate a certain sort of privileged, discreet, unexceptional, unchanging middle-class existence—which had changed after all, because it hardly existed any longer.” Hadley shifts through each of the at-odds sisters’ perspectives, a frequent technique of hers to remind us that people’s inner lives do not necessarily match others’ views of them. This is particularly effective in “Dido’s Lament,” which portrays a chance encounter between a former husband and wife almost entirely from her point of view until the very end, when a glimpse into his thoughts shows that the comfortable, affluent post-divorce existence she has glimpsed with chagrin is “all so that [she] could get to visit it some day, and see that he’d managed to have a life without her.” The mastery she has honed over a decades-long career makes Hadley’s gaze as sharp as her empathy is expansive; each tale feels as satisfying as a full-length novel despite—or perhaps because of—the ambiguous endings.

A pleasure to read, with characters and themes that linger long after the final page.