Hadley is adept at delineating the Cranes' brand of cultured middle-class Britishness in all its generational mutations…The Past offers a contemporary variant on the pastoral idyll. Hadley's evocation of Kington's Arthur Rackham-like tangle of mossy woods and slippery brooks is deliciously precise, as is her charting of the cultural implications of the area's recent upgrade from poor farmland to gentrified vacation spot…But even as we come to understand why Kington has such a deep psychological pull over the Crane children, we are shown how Britain's enduring class divisions ensure that they remain outsiders in this place…Hadley's many fans will welcome this solid addition to her continuing narrative of how brainy women and blundering men negotiate the slippery class and sex wars of modern-day Britain.
The Past
Narrated by Caroline Lennon
Tessa HadleyUnabridged — 10 hours, 35 minutes
The Past
Narrated by Caroline Lennon
Tessa HadleyUnabridged — 10 hours, 35 minutes
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Overview
“A novel so evocative of summer and adolescence that to read it is to reexperience the deep languor and longing of those days.” — Tayari Jones, O Magazine
“Exquisite. . . . For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures.” — Ron Charles, Washington Post
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.
Editorial Reviews
02/29/2016
Narrator of well over one hundred audio books, Lennon brings a veteran’s confidence to this quiet domestic drama in her marvelous evocation of Hadley’s language. Lennon prizes the novel’s slow description and careful characterizations of several generations of a British family. However, she falls flat in creating recognizable voices for those characters, all middle-aged siblings who return to the family’s country house for a summer holiday only to find that the wounds that once defined them are still festering under the surface. In particular, Lennon fails to distinguish the three sisters’ voices, despite the sharp differences in their personalities: the pragmatic Fran, the dreamy and self-absorbed Alice, and the chronically apprehensive Hetty. As well, when the novel reverts to an extended flashback to 1968, two other female characters share the same brisk intonations of Lennon’s usual voice. Though it’s a pleasant and highly intelligent voice, the performance misses the subtlety of Hadley’s cast of characters. A Harper hardcover. (Jan.)
11/23/2015
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.)
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 Hall and 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
“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
“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
“[An] exquisitely written family drama.” — Liz Loerke, US Weekly
“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.” — Jim Carmin, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“No one writes family like Hadley.” — Megan O'Grady, Vogue.com
“Beautiful.” — Travel & Leisure
“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.” — Barbara Love, Library Journal, starred review
“Masterful…. Captures the gentle tragedies of living, losses, and regrets…. Hadley is the patron saint of ordinary lives; her trademark empathy and sharp insight are out in force here.” — Kirkus, starred review
“Exceptional…. Familial drama at its best—unabashedly ordinary yet undoubtedly captivating.” — Publishers Weekly
“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.” — Kathleen Gerard, Shelf Awareness
“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.” — Carol Haggas, Booklist
“Beautifully written.” — Buffalo News
'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.'
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.
From the coziest and most familiar of fictional materials, Hadley has created a remarkable story as disturbing as it is diverting.
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.
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.
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.
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-
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
Beautifully written.
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.
An immaculate prose stylist.
[An] exquisitely written family drama.
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.
Beautiful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hadley brings a keen intelligence and emotional acuity to domestic fiction…. The Past glitters.
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.
Beautifully written.
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.
Beautiful.
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.
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.
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.
A novel of delicious readability that reaffirms its author’s reputation—Hadley is regularly and deservedly compared to Henry James and Alice Munro. She’s thrillingly perceptive and deeply sympathetic, and also a supreme craftsman…. An extremely affecting novel of cumulative richness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Hadley brings a keen intelligence and emotional acuity to domestic fiction…. The Past glitters.
06/01/2016
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
★ 2015-10-15
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 together—will 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 sections—two in the present and one set in the same house a generation earlier—the 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.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940175363211 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
The Past
A Novel
By Tessa Hadley
HarperCollins Publishers
Copyright © 2016 Tessa HadleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-227042-9
CHAPTER 1
ALICE WAS THE first to arrive, but she discovered as she stood at the front door that she had forgotten her key. The noise of their taxi receding, like an insect burrowing between the hills, was the only sound at first in the still afternoon, until their ears got used to other sounds: the jostling of water in the stream that ran at the bottom of the garden, a tickle of tiny movements in the hedgerows and grasses. At least it was an afternoon of balmy warmth, its sunlight diffused because the air was dense with seed floss, transparent-winged midges, pollen; light flickered on the grass, and under the silver birch leaf-shadows shifted, blotting their penny-shapes upon one another. Searching through her bag Alice put on a show of amusement and scatty self-deprecation. She was famously hopeless with keys. She had come with a young man who was her ex-boyfriend's son and on the train she had been preoccupied with the question of what stage of life she was at, whether people seeing them would think Kasim was her lover, or her child – though he wasn't either. Now he walked away from her around the house without saying anything, and she thought that this mishap with the keys had shrivelled her in his opinion, he was bored already. They were in the country, in the middle of nowhere, with no way back; the house was set behind a cluster of houses on a no through road where there was no café or pub or even shop where they could pass the time.
Behind her smiles she raged at Kasim for a moment. She wished now that she hadn't brought him. It had been a careless suggestion in a moment of feeling bountiful, having this place to offer; she hadn't really expected him to take her up on it and had been flattered when he did. But if she had been alone the keys wouldn't have mattered. It would have been a kind of bliss, even, to be shut out from the responsibility of opening up the house and making it ready for the others. She could have dropped onto the grass in the sunshine. She could have let go her eternal vigilance and fallen deep down here, in this place, Kington, of all places, into sleep, the real thing, the sleep that she was always seeking for and could never quite get. Alice was forty-six, dark, soft, concentrated yet indefinite – she could look like a different person in different photographs. Her complex personality was diffuse, always flying away in different directions, like her fine hair, which a man had once described as prune-coloured; it was soft and brown like the inside of prunes, and she wore it curling loose on her shoulders.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Past by Tessa Hadley. Copyright © 2016 Tessa Hadley. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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