Described by The Guardian in 2015 as "one of this country's great contemporary novelists," British writer and academic Hadley has been quietly producing works of subtly powerful prose for two decades. Like her recent novels, The Past (2015) and Late in the Day (2019), Free Love – Hadley's eighth – explores intimate relationships, sexuality, memory and grief, through an apparently ordinary-looking suburban family. But, Hadley writes, "under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged."