The Past 

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Sian Thomas

Tessa Hadley

Sally Marmion

Di Speirs

Tessa Hadley - The Past: Episode 4

The Past

Episode 4

Tessa Hadley - The Past

BBC Radio 4 - Tessa Hadley - The Past, Episode 4

Tessa Hadley's exquisite and witty new novel - a story of siblings, secrets and passions.

Tempers flare when Ivy loses it and keeps her secret close, while Kasim repays Alice with a joke. Read by Sian Thomas.

Ivy loses her temper and keeps her secret close and Kasim repays Alice with a joke.
 
Sian Thomas reads Tessa Hadley's powerful and haunting novel, a beautifully observed portrait of a family and the change wrought by time across the generations.

Three middle-aged sisters and a brother meet up in their grandparents' old house for three long, hot summer weeks. Under the idyllic surface, there are immediate tensions. Secrets, misunderstandings and passion play out as the characters shift and reappraise and a way of life - bourgeois, literate, ritualised - winds down to its inevitable end.

While the siblings circle each other, and the adolescents approach each other, the children watch and come to their own conclusions.

Tessa Hadley is one of Britain's finest writers, an acute observer of character, time and place and the most published short story writer in the New Yorker in recent years.

Abridged by Sally Marmion
Producer: Di Speirs

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2015.

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Drama: Relationships & Romance

Tessa Hadley's novel, a story of siblings, secrets, misunderstandings and passion.

Sian Thomas reads Tessa Hadley's powerful novel, a story of siblings, secrets, misunderstandings and passion, played out over one last, hot summer. Abridged by Sally Marmion

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