Changes

|title=Clever Girl

|author=Tessa Hadley

|publisher=Vintage

|date=March 2014

|video=WQwSFXQjExE

|summary=A quiet, deceptively simple novel about one woman's journey through life: family upheaval, love, academia and unplanned motherhood. Brilliant despite (or because of?) its reticence.

}}

Stella grows up with her single mother in Bristol in the 1960s; her father left when she was a baby, but her mother has cultivated the convenient myth that he died. In the stand-alone first chapter, Stella recounts a disturbing incident of domestic violence that affected her Aunt Andy. Sordid snippets from the ensuing court case stay with Stella over the years; 'Innocent-seeming fragments would get in past my defences…then stick to my imagination like tar.' Even so, the novel that follows is about the way in which we engage with memory – facts that linger versus those we, deliberately or subconsciously, choose not to tell.