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We Are Not in the World
We Are Not in the World
Jan 19, 2026 3:33 AM

Author:Conor O'Callaghan

We Are Not in the World

'Stylish, deft...an absolutely fascinating novel' Guardian

'Haunting, mesmerising, and so deeply intelligent' Kamila Shamsie, author of Women's Prize for Fiction winning Home Fire

'Powerful...compelling and profoundly moving' Irish Times

'Heartbreaking, sweetly logical and tentatively hopeful' Spectator

Heartbroken after a long, painful love affair, a man drives a haulage lorry from England to France. Travelling with him is a secret passenger - his daughter. Twenty-something, unkempt, off the rails.

With a week on the road together, father and daughter must restore themselves and each other, and repair a relationship that is at once fiercely loving and deeply scarred.

As they journey south, down the motorways, through the service stations, a devastating picture reveals itself: a story of grief, of shame, and of love in all its complex, dark and glorious manifestations.

______________

What readers are saying:

***** 'The prose is sublime and deeply moving . . . a stunning novel'

***** 'Beautifully written, lyrical and unsettling in its exploration of human frailties, family, love, and loss, grief'

**** 'A haunting, tragic and highly original story of a father and daughter travelling across England and France in a haulage truck, and discovering more about their relationship and past in all its raw candour'

MORE PRAISE FOR WE ARE NOT IN THE WORLD:

'Unusual, utterly original and mysterious . . . a must read' Elaine Feeney

'...the book stays with you, a haunting presence you cannot - and do not want to - escape...astounding.' Ruth Gilligan Extraordinary...achingly sad and tender and sexy, and the writing is very beautiful.' Louise Kennedy

'Wonderful, wrenching . . . full of enormous feelings very precisely rendered' Sara Baume

'Elusive, unsettling, beautiful, haunting. This is a complex, devastating study of human relations; a portrait of intense love and damage in equal measure.' Lisa Harding

'A whirlpool of memories, regrets and hopes' Tim Pears

'An uncanny ability to turn the seemingly insignificant into something monumental' Jan Carson

Reviews

Fascinating...part ode, part exhibit that reads with restrained affection for his accidental accumulations....these tees excavate an intimate history. The choices we make about what we find and keep point to our interior worlds...Murakami's understated love letters to his tees also convey how we give life to our things and vice versa.

—— Atlantic

It's safe to say there is no one like Murakami

—— Literary Review

Murakami is one of the best writers around

—— Time Out, on Norwegian Wood

Everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility

—— Guardian, on Norwegian Wood

Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original

—— The Times, on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Undeniably a somewhat eccentric book. But it's also a very likeable one... The overall effect is not unlike sharing a conversation with a genial bloke in a bar

—— Reader's Digest

One of the most influential novelists of his generation.

—— Observer

An incredibly readable and charming tour through Murakami's life through the T-shirts he has collected along the way... [the reader] feels a personal connection with him, as if we are reading his secret diary

—— Adam Davidson , Northern Echo

In keen, lush prose, Hadley conveys the many ways her characters delude themselves amid fraught relationships between parents and children as well as between lovers. The result is sumptuous and surprising.

—— Publishers Weekly

A sumptuous stylist, Hadley is a writer for whom language trumps all else. Any publication of hers, whether of short or long fiction, is cause for celebration for the pure pleasure of the prose.

—— Mia Levitin , Financial Times

Free Love is an absolute joy to read from a writer who never puts a word wrong. Fans of Small Pleasures will love it.

—— Sarra Manning , Red

Pacy and packed with well-drawn characters.

—— Sunday Telegraph, *Books to Look Out For 2022*

Compelling.

—— Erica Wagner , Harper's Bazaar

Hadley is our great novelist of bourgeois domesticity, sensitive to its emotional perturbations and...devotedly attentive to its gorgeous solidity.

—— James Marriott , The Times

Hadley... has the gift for bringing everything she has, sees and knows to the characters she creates... Free Love is brilliantly plotted and keeps its secret through two-thirds of its length so faithfully, I did not even begin to guess at the hugely satisfying slipknot ahead.

—— Kate Kellaway , Observer

No one is better than Tessa Hadley at capturing the secret longing that presides within her many wonderful characters. Her latest, written in her usual crisp, absorbing prose, charts the sexual awakening of one woman in 1960s London.

—— Jessie Thompson , Evening Standard, *Books to Look Out For 2022*

Achingly moving and real... Hadley's poignant drawing together of a situation...shows a writer with boundless compassion. Yet again, she offers insightful and sensitive understanding of the quiet compromises people make to survive in a deeply compromised world.

—— Michael Donkor , Guardian

A fascinating portrait of a world of politics, manners, morals and the decline of empire in a period of rapid societal change... Hadley writes compellingly fascinating characters viewed from every angle, perfectly encapsulating an era of change.

—— Kirsty McLuckie , Scotsman

A gorgeously magnanimous novel, which reprises Hadley's favoured themes of middle age, and how - and when, and if - to change one's life.

—— Stephanie Sy-Quia , Spectator

Daring and sensual, Free Love is a compulsive exploration of love, sexual freedom and living out the most meaningful version of our lives.

—— SheerLuxe

An engrossing ploy, elegant nuanced writing...this is a novel to savour

—— Morag MacInnes , Tablet, *Novel of the Week*

As ever, Ms Hadley's prose is limpid and measured yet richly sonorous: her story combines a modern sensibility with the psychological realism of writers such as Henry James... The ending glimmers with possibility--while suggesting that liberation comes at a cost.

—— Economist

With astute psychological awareness of her characters, Hadley presents a visceral and engaging picture of a bygone time. Unexpected twists and unclichéd characters support the luscious language, making this a real pleasure of a read.

—— UK Press Syndication

Free Love artfully delves beneath the veneer of the British middle class to tell an intimate story of generational discord, political change and sexual freedom.

—— Mark Vessery , i

Hadley's resplendent eighth novel... [has] poignantly astute observations on class, destiny and the false promises of the sexual revolution.

—— Hephzibah Anderson , Mail on Sunday

Hadley's eighth novel is as absorbing as any of her other fiction, with complex family secrets, brilliant insights...and lush descriptions of nature.

—— Markie Robson-Scott , Arts Desk

Hadley chooses her words with spellbinding precision.

—— Claire Allfree , Metro

Hadley's complex sentences are purring marvels of engineering... A brilliant writer of interiority...she has a gift...for portraying the state of wanting to be wanted, or simply to be seen... almost every page struck me anew with some elegant phrasing, feline irony or shrewdly sympathetic insight.

—— Anthony Cummins , Observer

Few contemporary novelists write about their characters' inner worlds with a finely filigreed but plain-spoken acuity that Tessa Hadley brings to her work...accessing roving, rich depths... Hadley is a master in her field.

—— Lucy Scholes , Daily Telegraph

"With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she's one of the greatest stylists alive. . . . To read Hadley's fiction is to grow self-conscious in the best way: to recognize with astonishment the emotions playing behind our own expressions, to hear articulated our own inchoate anxieties. . . . The whole grief-steeped story should be as fun as a dirge, but instead it feels effervescent-lit not with mockery but with the energy of Hadley's attention, her sensitivity to the abiding comedy of human desire. . . . Extraordinary.

—— The Washington Post

Brilliant.... In the hands of a lesser novelist, the intricate tangle of lives at the center of Late in the Day would feel like just such a self-satisfied riddle or, at best, like sly narrative machinations. Because this is Tessa Hadley, it instead feels earned and real and, even in its smallest nuances, important.... It's to her credit that Hadley manages to be old-fashioned and modernist and brilliantly postmodern all at once.... We've seen this before, and we've never seen this before, and it's spectacular.

—— New York Times Book Review

Utterly engrossing... Free Love is highly gratifying.

—— Ellen Peirson-Hagger , New Statesman

Free Love is a triumph.

—— Sarah Collins , Prospect

Brilliantly done... Hadley writes with devastating psychological insight, her prose spare and scalpel sharp. But she is also judiciously non-judgemental, a generous chronicler of the foibles and fears that mar and make a marriage.

—— Eithne Farry , Daily Express

Free Love is an absolute joy to read from a writer who never puts a word wrong. Fans of Small Pleasures will love it.

—— Sarra Manning , Red

[A] brilliant, sensual, seductively plotted new novel... Hadley has written an extraordinary story about love and transformation.

—— Independent

Free Love is often deeply perceptive and affecting... it lets you imagine what it was like to wrestle with old and new ways of thinking in an age that shaped (and continues to shape) our own.

—— Guy Stevenson , Literary Review

It's the 1960s and socialism, sex and nuclear anxiety have come crashing into the middle-class bubble Tessa Hadley novels usually operate so brilliant within.

—— The Times, *Summer Reads of 2022*

A story about change and its limits, its beautifully judged ending will bring you to tears.

—— Daily Mail, *Summer Reads of 2022*

[An] acutely realised, deeply humane novel... Unmissable.

—— Tablet, *Summer Reads of 2022*

No novel published this year gave me more pleasure than Tessa Hadley's Free Love.

—— New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Nothing drew me in as conclusively as Free Love by Tessa Hadley, who is surely one of our most astute and deft observers of everyday lives.

—— New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Hadley's novels continue to get better and better - and this is her finest, most pleasurable yet... it's near enough the perfect present in book form

—— Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*

She is, in all her mastery of the craft, a writer's writer.

—— Marie Claire
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