WINNER of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction WINNER of the Mississippi Author Award for Adult Fiction selected by the Mississippi Library Association WINNER of the 2019 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for Fiction WINNER of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction Finalist for the 2019 Colorado Book Awards for Literary Fiction* “An ode to William Faulkner. . . . … Finalist for the 2019 Colorado Book Awards for Literary Fiction*
“An ode to William Faulkner. . . . As Southern as it gets.”–Deep South Magazine
A compelling addition to contemporary Southern Gothic fiction, deftly weaving together local legends, family secrets, and the search for a missing child.
Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it’s the Devil’s place, a place that’s been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot and they can’t resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water. Until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes. Not drowned, not lost . . . simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.
Years pass with no sign, no hope of ever finding Pansy alive, and as surely as their mother died of a broken heart, Bert and Willet can’t move on. So when clues surface drawing them to the remote tip of Florida, they drop everything and drive south. Deep in the murky depths of the Florida Everglades they may find the answer to Pansy’s mysterious disappearance . . . but truth, like the past, is sometimes better left where it lies.
Perfect for fans of Flannery O’Connor and Dorothy Allison, The Past Is Never is an atmospheric, haunting story of myths, legends, and the good and evil we carry in our hearts.
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All around good drama. Good character development, interesting story, believable
Likeable in depth characters. Kept me guessing at outcome
Believable characters, compassionate and unusual
Tiffany Quay Tyson has written a gripping novel steeped in the Southern gothic tradition, with a compelling mix of contemporary grit. Dark as the quarry that spooks a Mississippi town and twisty as the Florida mangrove tunnels traversed in search of answers to unraveling family mysteries, The Past is Never had me turning pages long into the night.
Haunting and beautiful, steeped in history and myth, The Past is Never unwinds the darkest knots of what binds families together and reveals the marvels and monsters which lie within us all. In lucid, piercing prose, Tiffany Quay Tyson pushes to the raw edge of life, where the real and the unreal almost touch. This is great southern fiction.
You hold in your hands Stranger Things but with a satisfying ending. In the sort of cleanly tuned prose that makes another fiction writer happy, Tyson penetrates your imagination with characters and places so real they feel like your own suppressed memories. I’ll never look at the Everglades the same way again.
Wise, disturbing, and quietly powerful, The Past Is Never is an American novel for our time. With rare and unflinching honesty, Tyson shows us the darkness, then reaches into it and extracts light. The discovery is breathtaking.
I simply could not tie the parts of the story together. A novel that is a series of flashbacks and fast forwards is confusing to me.
Well it certainly took me long enough to get to The Past Is Never by Tiffany Quay Tyson (it came out in 2018), and man am I kicking myself for that! This was a slow-burn, Southern gothic treat of a book and it does get pretty dark. I loved the combination of mystery, magical realism, and gothic and it was very atmospheric. I started by reading the book but switched to the audio and I highly recommend it. The narrator is Devon Sorvari, and she is just so good at what she does. Her accent really put me in the mood for this book, and I really enjoyed the way she brought the book to life.
There is some legend and myth built into the book, and they quickly become more real the further we get into the story. I loved the way it switches back and forth between past and present, and there is a lot more going on than just the mystery of where Pansy went. There are deeper and darker subjects that come to the surface, and The Past Is Never was able to surprise me in more ways than one. I can definitely see why it won awards, and if you read this and are having a hard time getting into it, I recommend waiting it out – it will be worth it!
Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an advance review copy of this book, all opinions and thoughts are my own.
Overall a good read. A little slow at first. Once you get all the characters set in the scheme of things it was a good read.
Good southern literature. Great characters
A great story, showing how lives can be so intertwined and across generations. I wanted a little more from the ending, but it was still a great book.
Did not like the few( 4) chapters so stopped .
Worthy of the reviews and then some.
A very real and fascinating take on the great Faulkner quote
“The past is never dead, it’s not even past “
Great books with lots of twist and turns!