One woman's life, from childhood to middle age, by Britain's most acute, perceptive novelist of ordinary lives Clever Girl follows the story of Stella, from her childhood with her single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The story is full of drama—violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella's schooldays, two sons by different fathers—yet it is Hadley's observation of ordinary lives, of the way men and women think and feel and interact, that dazzles.