The Past: A Novel

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.

“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.