Past

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 MagazineExquisite. . . . For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures.Ron Charles,Washington PostWinner of the Windham Campbell PrizeAWashington PostBest Book of the YearATimeBest Book of the YearASan Francisco ChronicleTop 10 Book of the YearAHuffington PostBest Fiction Book of the YearANew York TimesEditors Choice Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriends 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 pasttheir mother took them there to live when she left their fatherbut now, they may have to sell it. And beneath the idyllic pastoral surface lie tensions. As the familys stories and silences intertwine over the course of three long, hot weeks, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of lifebourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglicanwinds down to its inevitable end.