The Past - Softcover

Hadley, Tessa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062270427 ISBN 13: 9780062270429

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2016

Synopsis

Winner of the Windham Campbell Prize - A Washington Post Best Book of the Year - A Time Best Book of the Year - A San Francisco Chronicle Top 10 Book of the Year - A Huffington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year - A New York Times Editors' Choice

In her most accessible, commercial novel yet, 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.

With five novels and two collections of stories, Tessa Hadley has earned a reputation as a fiction writer of remarkable gifts. She brings all of her considerable skill and an irresistible setup to The Past, a novel in which three sisters, a brother, and their children assemble at their country house.

These three weeks may be their last time there; the upkeep is prohibitive, and they may be forced to sell this beloved house filled with memories of their shared past (their mother took them there to live when she left their father). Yet beneath the idyllic pastoral surface, hidden passions, devastating secrets, and dangerous hostilities threaten to consume them.

Sophisticated and sleek, Roland's new wife (his third) arouses his sisters' jealousies and insecurities. Kasim, the twenty-year-old son of Alice's ex-boyfriend, becomes enchanted with Molly, Roland's sixteen-year-old daughter. Fran's young children make an unsettling discovery in a dilapidated cottage in the woods that shatters their innocence. Passion erupts where it's least expected, leveling the quiet self-possession of Harriet, the eldest sister.

Over the course of this summer holiday, the family's stories and silences intertwine, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life--bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican--winds down to its inevitable end.

With subtle precision and deep compassion, Tessa Hadley brilliantly evokes a brewing storm of lust and envy, the indelible connections of memory and affection, the fierce, nostalgic beauty of the natural world, and the shifting currents of history running beneath the surface of these seemingly steady lives. The result is a novel of breathtaking skill and scope that showcases this major writer's extraordinary talents.

About this title

Review:

"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

"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 Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

"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

"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

"Few writers have been as important to me as Tessa Hadley. She puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master, and The Past is a big, brilliant novel: sensual, wise, compelling--and utterly magnificent."--Lily King, author of Euphoria

"Each player... is so distinct, so warmly dimensional you soon feel you know them as well as they know each other. This alone... is a marvel. More marvelous still is Hadley's seamless, steady control, moving individual and collective stories forward and backward in time - a splendid work."--Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle

"Universal in its appeal and its intuitive ways of revealing how human nature, even our own, can surprise us.... Readers...should prepare themselves...for the beautiful cadences of Hadley's descriptive, lyrical prose."--Connie Ogle, Miami Herald

"Hadley is so perceptive... that it can feel like she's revealing little secrets about life that it would have taken you years to notice on your own. A-"--Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly

"Splendid.... Hadley's gift for depicting the interior lives of children and adults rivals Ian McEwans's in the aptly lauded first section of Atonement."--Amy Gentry, Chicago Tribune

"Hadley's beautifully composed new novel... recalls Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris in its dovetailing story lines, but the author's genius for the thorny comforts of family... are entirely her own."--Megan O'Grady, Vogue

From the Back Cover:

"An exquisite writer, a writer's writer, with a fine eye for detail and a way of crafting sentences that make you stop and inhale . . . Hadley should be a bestseller rather than literary fiction's best kept secret."--The Times (London)

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, where simmering tensions and secrets rise to the surface over three long, hot weeks.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.

Sophisticated and sleek, Roland's new wife (his third) arouses his sisters' jealousies and insecurities.
Kasim, the twenty-year-old son of Alice's ex-boyfriend, becomes enchanted with Molly, Roland's sixteen-year-old daughter. Fran's young children make an unsettling discovery in an abandoned cottage in the woods that shatters their innocence. Passion erupts where it's least expected, leveling the quiet self-possession of Harriet, the eldest sister. As the family's stories and silences intertwine, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life--bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican--winds down to its inevitable end.

Over five novels and two collections of stories, Tessa Hadley has earned a reputation as a fiction writer of remarkable gifts. She brings all of her considerable skill to The Past, a work of breathtaking scope and beauty--her most ambitious and accomplished novel yet.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0062270427
• ISBN 13: 9780062270429
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336