The Past

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'There is something reassuring yet deliciously unexpected about a Tessa Hadley novel.' - Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

Over five novels and two collections of stories Tessa Hadley has earned a reputation as a fiction writer of remarkable gifts, and been compared with Elizabeth Bowen and Alice Munro. In her new novel three sisters and a brother meet up in their grandparents' old house for three long, hot summer weeks. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past -- their mother took them there when she left their father - but now they may have to sell it. And under the idyllic surface, there are tensions.

Roland has come with his new wife and his sisters don't like her. Kasim, the twenty-year-old son of Alice's ex-boyfriend, makes plans to seduce Molly, Roland's teenage daughter. Fran's children uncover an ugly secret in a ruined cottage in the woods. Passion erupts where it's least expected, blasting the quiet self-possession of Harriet, the oldest sister. A way of life - bourgeois, literate, ritualised - winds down to its inevitable end.

With uncanny precision and extraordinary sympathy, Tessa Hadley charts the squalls of lust and envy disrupting this ill-assorted house party, as well as the consolations of memory and affection, the beauty of the natural world, the shifting of history under the social surface. From the first page the reader is absorbed and enthralled, watching a superb craftsman at work.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Four siblings gather in their childhood home to determine its future. The oldest is the most distant, unsure she'll even stay the full three weeks they've planned to be there. The middle sister arrives with two children, complaining about her missing husband. The youngest sister inexplicably brings an ex-boyfriend's adult son. Their one brother comes with his teenage daughter-and introduces his third wife. Interrupting the fraught family reunion is a flashback to the titular past, which reveals how the family came to live in the home when their disappointed mother sought refuge from their philandering father. So sly is Hadley's (Clever Girl) revealing novel that even less-than-responsible direction might be forgivingly overlooked. British actress Caroline Lennon's crisp, proper narration is marred by the lack of narrative breaks that clearly appear on the page but are ignored here, resulting in unnecessarily jarring jumps in story flow. VERDICT Regardless, recommended for libraries building literary fiction audiobook collections. ["A fresh take on a familiar story of fractious family reunions where old resentments resurface, new alliances form, and long-buried secrets are uncovered": LJ 10/1/15 starred review of the Harper hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.