“It was never going to be the ordinary kind of wedding,” says Janey in the opening line of a story from Tessa Hadley’s “After the Funeral.” “My mother didn’t do anything ordinary.”

Janey is 17 when her mother makes plans to remarry Patrick. She approves of her mother’s intellectual husbandto-be. The first problem of the big day arises when Janey’s half-sister declares her love for Patrick, then topples out of a high window. The second occurs when Janey decides she wants Patrick for herself and asks him to marry her instead.

“Wedding” is a short yet substantial story in Hadley’s latest collection. Like most of the English writer’s fiction, the focus is on family and relationships, the fault lines that course through supposedly happy unions and the hidden agendas that lurk behind seemingly happy facades. All 12 stories that make up “After the Funeral” are the work of a singular talent.

That talent is on full display when Hadley deftly switches the perspectives of her characters. “Dido’s Lament” follows Lynette as she bumps into ex-husband Toby on the London underground and then goes back to his house to see where he has ended up. When she leaves, the story slides onto a parallel narrative track by shifting to Toby’s somewhat jaundiced frame of mind. We learn he only showed her his home so she could see “he’d managed to have a life without her.”

Hadley performs the same trick in “The Bunty Club.” Three sisters are reunited in their childhood home when their elderly mother is taken to a hospital. Rotating their viewpoints, Hadley reveals their markedly different outlooks. Elsewhere, “Mia” finds Hadley intrigued by the juxtaposition between brains and beauty as one dowdy, intelligent woman strives to become “glamorous, fatal, unattainable.”

These are captivating stories, rich in character and fine-grained detail. Hadley’s elegant prose is memorably descriptive and entertains while offering shrewd, subtle insights into how we tick and the ties that bind us.

DETAILS “After the Funeral and Other Stories” by Tess Hadley; Knopf (240 pages, $28)