This is The Author's Voice, New Fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Author's Voice, we'll hear Tessa Hadley read her story,

Dido's Lament, from the August 8th and 15th issue of the magazine.

Tessa Hadley has published six novels and four story collections in story, Dido's Lament, from the August 8th and 15th issue of the magazine.

Tessa Hadley has published six novels and four story collections, including Sunstroke and other stories and married love. She won this year's Wyndham Campbell Prize for fiction.

Now here's Tessa Hadley.

Dido's Lament Lynette was on Oxford Street, which was a stupid place to be at any time, and especially at

five o'clock on a winter afternoon. It was her own fault. She'd gone into John Lewis

after work for a few things she needed,

and then she'd tried on some clothes which she hadn't meant to, and now she was stuck in a crowd

of other shoppers and workers, fuming inwardly and shuffling in half steps, funneling into the entrance

to the underground. Everybody was shapeless, muffled in down coats,

hooded. Sleet was blowing in their faces. No one looked up at the Christmas lights.

Lynette had heard someone say that one of the shops was pumping artificial snow into the street,

which made the idea of even real snow somehow disgusting.

Lynette was tall, anxious, original in her late thirties with coffee-coloured freckled skin.

Her hair was shaved above her ears, and the rest of it dyed bronze and pink was piled up in a striking bird's nest mess,

into which soft spatters of sleet blew and melted.

She was wearing a red, tartan scarf with a wool coat she'd found in a charity shop,

bright pink with a big shawl collar,

and believed that she despised the kind of clothes you could buy in department

...