Holds Alert: THE PAST
Rave reviews and a storm of attention are helping Tessa Hadley’s newest novel wrack up impressive holds queues.
The Past (Harper; OverDrive Sample), is a character-centered novel about families.
Entertainment Weekly gives it an A-, saying:
“Hadley is so perceptive about the tiny ways we find ourselves performing for one another, and so skilled at fluidly dipping in and out of the minds of her characters—whether they’re 6 and wishing to spy on the grown-ups or 76 and considering the comforts of decades-long marriage—that it can feel like she’s revealing little secrets about life that it would have taken you years to notice on your own.”
Ron Charles writes in The Washington Post:
“… 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.”
The Guardian flat out raves:
“In her patient, unobtrusive, almost self-effacing way, Tessa Hadley has become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them. Consider all the things she can do. She writes brilliantly about families and their capacity for splintering. She is a remarkable and sensuous noticer of the natural world. She handles the passing of time with a magician’s finesse. She is possessed of a psychological subtlety reminiscent of Henry James, and an ironic beadiness worthy of Jane Austen. To cap it all, she is dryly, deftly humorous. Is that enough to be going on with?”
It has made The Millions “Most Anticipated: The Great 2016 Book Preview,” The NY Magazine list of the “7 Books You Need to Read This January,” and The Huffpost Arts & Culture’s “32 New Books To Add to Your Shelf in 2016,” which says:
“Hadley’s popular reputation, especially in the U.S., hasn’t caught up with her critical one. But this novel, which uses her much-praised perceptiveness and her fine-brushed prose to tell a story of familial secrets and tensions, may help her break through.”
Indeed. Holds are exceeding a 3:1 ratio by wide margins at many libraries we checked.
To catch up with the book, listen to this interview with Hadley, which aired earlier in the month on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.