The "supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence (New York Times Book Review) turns her astute eye to a dramatic family reunion, where simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over three long, hot summer weeks.
Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriend's son, descend on their grandparents' dilapidated old home in the Somerset countryside for a final summer holiday. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past--their mother took them there to live when she left their father--but now, they may have to sell it. And beneath the idyllic pastoral surface lie tensions. As the family's stories and silences intertwine over the course of three long, hot weeks, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life--bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican--winds down to its inevitable end.
"Exquisite.... For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures. Like those North American masters of the domestic realm, Hadley crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural.... Extraordinary." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post
"From the coziest and most familiar of fictional materials, Hadley has created a remarkable story as disturbing as it is diverting." -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Hadley is so insightful, such a lovely writer, that she pulls you right into the tangle of wires that connect and trip up the stressed siblings. She makes you feel for these imperfect people, want to scold them, and ultimately accept them as they are. Just like family." -- People, Book of the Week
"A novel so evocative of summer and adolescence that to read it is to reexperience the deep languor and longing of those days.... We come to understand that the past... is merely yesterday's present.... It is that revelation that elevates the novel, deepening our own understanding of what shapes us." -- Tayari Jones, O Magazine
"Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts." -- Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Halland Bring Up the Bodies
"Deliciously precise.... Built in a Chekhovian manner, handily assembling the grown members of an extended family and their offspring under one roof.... Hadley is adept at delineating the Cranes' brand of cultured middle-class Britishness in all its generational mutations." -- Fernanda Eberstadt, New York Times Book Review
"I find Tessa Hadley's work genuinely helpful, especially when it comes to the big subjects: love and marriage, the political versus the personal, children, friendship. And then there are the sentences themselves, so precise and beautiful, often sly, sometimes devastating, always expertly paced. Few writers give me such consistent pleasure." -- Zadie Smith, author of NW
"Hadley brings a keen intelligence and emotional acuity to domestic fiction.... The Past glitters." -- Heller McAlpin, NPR
"Chekhovian by way of a modern-day British pastoral.... Hadley moves deftly back and forth between eras and generations.... As in Chekhov's dramas, The Past is a stage on which nothing much happens, brilliantly, even as everything slowly disintegrates." -- Boris Kachka, New York
"I finished 'The Past' sadly -- why did it have to end? -- with a sense that I had understood something profound about both Hadley's characters, and my own life. Many readers will, I suspect, in the presence of this exhilarating novel feel the same." -- Margot Livesey, Boston Globe
"Hadley glides like a familiar spirit through the rooms of the house and the perspectives of her characters.... Her novels have a moral spaciousness that gives their ordinary settings and conflicts a philosophical range.... "The Past" shows Ms. Hadley's gifts in fine fettle." -- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"Hadley's novel is the kind of observant, bittersweet book whose pleasures defy plot summaries....With Hadley's wry insights and gorgeous sentences, readers, like Alice, will find themselves only too happy to be enfolded by 'The Past.'" -- Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor
"An immaculate prose stylist." -- Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings
