The Past: A Novel - Couverture rigide

“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)