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Narrated by Antonia Beamish
Tessa HadleyUnabridged — 11 hours, 1 minutes
Narrated by Antonia Beamish
Tessa HadleyUnabridged — 11 hours, 1 minutes
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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.
“Deliciously precise. . . . Built in a Chekhovian manner, handily assembling the grown members of an extended family and their offspring under one roof.”-New York Times Book Review
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
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.
Placing fraught family relationships under the microscope, Hadley, wise and discerning, offers a subtle-yet-bold examination of complex emotional subtexts that have the power to bring kin together or destroy the bonds that would otherwise unite them.
Hadley’s prose is descriptively rich. She elevates the mundane via her keen understanding go people and the emotional complexities of marriages and families—secrets, subtle deceptions and loyalties.
A fresh take on a familiar story of fractious family reunions where old resentments resurface, new alliances form, and long-buried secrets are uncovered. A great read whether at the cottage or just dreaming of one.
Beautiful.
Hadley’s formidable storytelling talent and compassionate understanding of humanity pull us right into this beautifully told narrative…. A memorable novel that continues to resonate well after the reader has turned the last page, and makes us long for the next work of fiction by this outstanding English writer.
[An] exquisitely written family drama.
An immaculate prose stylist.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
Hadley brings a keen intelligence and emotional acuity to domestic fiction…. The Past glitters.
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.
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.
No one writes family like Hadley.
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.
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-
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From the coziest and most familiar of fictional materials, Hadley has created a remarkable story as disturbing as it is diverting.
A British writer whose work probes the dangers and joys of family life, Tessa Hadley writes like a dream, even if some of her stories can haunt you like a nightmare….Hadley’s measured, perfectly controlled prose masterfully chronicles her characters’ turmoil; these stories are gemlike and unforgettable.
A new Tessa Hadley novel is a pleasure to be savoured. In her five novels and two collections of stories, Hadley has matched the psychological insight of Henry James with the sharp dialogue of Elizabeth Bowen.... A hugely enjoyable and keenly intelligent novel, brimming with the vitality of unruly desire.
Masterful.
Masterly….When it comes to domestic drama Hadley is without rival, and here her considerable talent is poured into an astonishingly astute grasp of ‘the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence’.
[An] expertly wrought depiction of family life. Hadley’s arresting descriptions of the physical and emotional landscape, and her tender approach to love, lust and, crucially, the passing of time underline her reputation as one of the UK’s finest contemporary novelists.
Tessa Hadley has become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them.
Hadley should be a bestseller rather than literary fiction’s best kept secret…. [She] is an exquisite writer, a writer’s writer, with a fine eye for detail and a way of crafting sentences that stop and make you inhale.
Hadley should be a bestseller rather than literary fiction’s best kept secret…. [She] is an exquisite writer, a writer’s writer, with a fine eye for detail and a way of crafting sentences that stop and make you inhale.
★ 10/01/2015
With their quaint furniture, vintage linens, seashell collections, and sepia photographs, old country cottages have a definite mystique. So it is with the Crane family cottage, where the now-grown children were raised by their grandparents after their mother died and their father abandoned them and where they regularly return for summer vacations. Accompanied by various partners and offspring are Harriet, the introspective loner; free-spirited Alice; Fran, the wife of a musician; and Roland, the successful academic, who arrives with his stunning new Argentinian wife. While the adults gossip and argue over whether to spend money on the house in need of repair or to sell up and recoup their losses, the children are left to wander the woods and create mischief in a derelict house they find in the forest. The past intrudes upon the present in the revealing middle of the book, an episode in which their dreamy, impractical mother returned home, seeking an escape from her unhappy marriage. VERDICT A fresh take on a familiar story of fractious family reunions where old resentments resurface, new alliances form, and long-buried secrets are uncovered. A great read whether at the cottage or just dreaming of one. [See Prepub Alert, 7/13/15.]—Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
| BN ID: | 2940176414806 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 08/03/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
