Zwei und zwei

For 30 years, they have been friends: the quiet painter Christine, her husband Alex, who felt called to be a poet and now works as a teacher, the successful art dealer Zachary, and his flamboyant wife Lydia. The four lead a respectable life in London, discussing art and literature, having children, and going on vacations together. Everything is good. Then Zachary dies, completely unexpectedly. Lydia moves in with Christine and Alex. But the loss of their friend and husband does not bring the three closer together. The past catches up with them, old wounds resurface. Have they made the right choices? Is it ever possible to make the right ones? What has become of their longings, the life plans of their youth? And what actually happened back in Venice? Tessa Hadley has written a wonderfully elegiac novel about the ordinary mistakes and misunderstandings of life, a "comedy of manners" in which small gestures tell everything, a book whose wisdom and subtle irony are irresistible.