Tessa Hadley’s most recent novel, Late in the Day, made a big impression on me when I read it earlier this year, so much so that I knew I would want to track down and read her earlier books as soon as I could.  I found two, The Past and London Train, when browsing in Hatchards in St. Pancras and snapped them up.  Having just finished The Past, published first in 2015, I’m very happy to say it is at least as good as Late in the Day. It’s thrilling to discover not just an exceptional talent but a writer who does brilliantly all the things I want from a novel.

Four middle-age siblings come together for a three-week vacation in their grandparents’ dilapidated but much-loved house set deep in the English countryside.  Family meals, trips to the beach, and walks in the fields punctuate days in which intense emotions, rivalries, and tensions are the undercurrent.  The past is never absent. No one leaves unchanged.

I have a hunch that British readers might just get that little bit more from Hadley’s novels. There’s something quintessentially English about Hadley’s books and she’s certainly writing within what I think is a recognizable English tradition, joining the likes of Anita Brookner,  A.S. Byatt, and Margaret Drabble.  That is, by the way, very high praise indeed in my mind. Hadley’s is certainly not the type of fiction that appeals to everyone and at a superficial level there may seem something archaic about stories set in that milieu of the self-aware, slightly agonized English upper middle class. That shouldn’t deter anyone (from anywhere). Like all very good novelists, Hadley’s preoccupations are the things that should matter to all of us.