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 Magazine
"Exquisite. . . . For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro,
the book offers similar deep pleasures." -- Ron Charles, Washington
Post
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.
