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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Tessa Hadley teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University College in Cardiff, Wales.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Not much happens in this sixth novel from Hadley (Clever Girl), yet even its most quotidian events seem bathed in meaning and consequence. Set exclusively on the rambling grounds of a crumbling English cottage estate, the story follows four middle-aged siblings as they putter about their deceased grandparents' home for three weeks, deciding whether or not to sell it. Split into three acts-two bookends that take place in the present, and one middle section that flashes back to their dead mother's brief return to the cottage during a tumultuous time in her marriage-the book has the feeling of a disjointed structure. But like her previous works, it's Hadley's ability to probe the quirks of her characters' psyches that makes this novel exceptional. Whether it's the vain second-youngest sibling, Alice, and her habit of overcompensating for her brother's and sisters' inadequacies, or the introverted oldest sibling Hettie, and her secret obsession with her stuffy brother, Roland, and his sophisticated Argentinian wife (his third), Hadley has a knack for exposing each character's most pressing vulnerabilities. Of special note are the scenes involving the teenagers at the house-Roland's 16-year-old daughter, Molly, and Alice's ex-boyfriend's college-age son, Kasim. The lovebirds' blooming infatuation with each other is palpable and awkward; it recalls the epic nature of falling helplessly, giddily in love for the first time. This is familial drama at its best-unabashedly ordinary yet undoubtedly captivating. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Siblings Harriet, Alice, Fran, and Roland gather at their grandparents' ramshackle house deep in the English countryside for three weeks, ostensibly to decide what to do with it, now that their parents are gone. More than the site of an occasional family retreat, the old house is where their mother brought them when her marriage to their father was failing. Now, Roland is there with his new wife and teenage daughter, joined by Fran and her two precocious children, while Alice appears with the college-age son of a former lover. Only Harriet arrives alone, though ghosts and shadows accompany her just as surely as any flesh-and-blood partner. It's close quarters at the isolated homestead, a veritable petri dish of regret and desire, recrimination and retaliation, all of which bubble up and smolder in dizzying fits of remorse and acceptance. Placing fraught family relationships under the microscope, Hadley (Clever Girl, 2014), 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.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2015 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Four middle-aged siblings reunite at their family home in the English countryside in Hadley's (Clever Girl, 2014, etc.) quietly masterful domestic portrait. They arrive one by one, gathering at the decrepit old house for what may be the last time (memories are one thing; the cost of maintenance is another): Alice first, artistic and sentimental; Fran, frazzled and practical, her two children in tow and her touring musician husband frustratingly absent; Harriet, the eldest, self-contained and dignified; and Roland, the only brother, distant and academic, newly married (for the third time) to an Argentinian lawyer the sisters have yet to meet. When he arrives with his new wife and 16-year-old daughter, Molly, the family is complete, plus one: Alice has brought her ex-boyfriend's college-aged son, Kasim, along, too. Nothing much "happens" in the novel or, at least, not outwardly. The siblings drink tea, they drink gin, they bicker; they mind Fran's children, Ivy and Arthur, watch romance bloom between Molly and Kasim, and allow the question that has brought them togetherwill they sell the house?to be buried under the business of family vacationing: food preparation, child care, swimming. But inwardly, the sisters are in near-constant upheaval. Hadley expertly captures the gentle tragedies of living, losses, and regrets that are at once momentous and too quotidian to mention: aging, the passage of time, the fissures and slights and unspoken disappointments that simmer underneath the surfaces of all families. The melancholy drama here is not external but internal; not in facts or in actions but in thoughts. Broken up into three dreamy sectionstwo in the present and one set in the same house a generation earlierthe novel might seem overly precious if it weren't so bracingly precise. Hadley is the patron saint of ordinary lives; her trademark empathy and sharp insight are out in force here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
