The 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.&;Deliciously precise. . . . Built in a Chekhovian manner, handily assembling the grown members of an extended family and their offspring under one roof.&;&;New York Times Book Review 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.