I was lucky enough to hear Tessa Hadley speak about this book and her writing in general before I read it, but I don't think that influenced what I thought about it. It's quite a simple story about some siblings and their children coming together in an old family house to decide whether they are going to keep it or not. Another house features too - an old cottage in the countryside. Everything - the house, the countryside, the characters are described perfectly, beautifully. Relationships move, blend and shift during the story, people bumping up against others, nothing terribly shocking, but the book is all the better for that. We get inside nearly all the characters heads - shifting paragraph by paragraph which works surprisingly and exceptionally well. And at the end some things are suggested that help with a resolution, but they aren't laboured.
It's the kind of book I wish I could have written. I don't understand why it hasn't won any prizes.