by Tim Pears
Tim Pears is the author of nine novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award), In a Land of Plenty (made into a ten part BBC series), Landed (shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012 and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2011, winner of the MJA Open Book Awards 2011) and, most recently, The Horseman, the first book in The West Country Trilogy. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. He lives in Oxford with his wife and children.
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THE WEST COUNTRY TRILOGY
The Horseman
‘A novel that is as moving and profound as it is evocative of the landscape and period … Powerful, vivid and humane’ Observer
1911. In a forgotten valley on the Devon–Somerset border, the seasons unfold, marked only by the rituals of the farming calendar. Twelve-year-old Leopold Sercombe skips school to help his father, a carter. Skinny and pale, Leo dreams of a job on the estate’s stud farm. He is breaking a colt for his father when a boy dressed in a Homburg, breeches and riding boots appears. Peering under the stranger’s hat, he discovers Miss Charlotte, the Master’s daughter. And so begins a friendship between the children, bound by a deep love of horses, but divided by rigid social boundaries – boundaries that become increasingly difficult to navigate as they approach adolescence.
‘As a testament to a forgotten generation of countrymen it is unsurpassed’ The Times
‘The pleasure of it lies in taking in the language and the setting – the West country, in 1911 and 1912 – and in reading it like a long poem, with each chapter a stanza … I am ready for volume two’ Jane Smiley, Guardian
‘This book needs to be read with quiet attention to reap its rich rewards’ Daily Mail
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In the Place of Fallen Leaves
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Award
‘A gifted storyteller, steeped in country lore and the beauty of ordinary events. Like Thomas Hardy whose kindred spirit quietly animates these pages, he is concerned with the dignity of work, the force of destiny and the consequences of human passion’ New York Times
This overwhelmingly hot summer everything seems to be slowing down in the tiny Devon village where Alison lives, as if the sun is pouring hot glue over it. ‘This idn’t nothin’,’ says Alison’s grandmother, recalling a drought when the earth swallowed lambs, and the summer after the war when people got electric shocks off each other. But Alison knows her grandmother’s memory is lying: this is far worse. She feels that time has stopped just as she wants to enter the real world of adulthood. In fact, in the cruel heat of summer, time is creeping towards her, and closing in around the valley.
‘More perfect than any first novel deserves to be’ Observer
‘This is it. This is the real thing. This is whatever I mean by the work of a born writer … Comic and wry and elegiac and shrewd and thoughtful all at once. Please read it’ A. S. Byatt
‘Tim Pears’ beautiful first novel brings just a touch of Macondo to rural Devon in the heatwave of 1984’ Salman Rushdie
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Blenheim Orchard
‘A brilliantly insightful family saga, full of comedy and sadness’ Daily Mail
Ezra and Sheena Pepin live in Oxford with their three children. Ezra has abandoned his calling as an anthropologist; Sheena has found hers running a travel company. They are like everyone else: overworked, worried about their children, trying to preserve their marriage. But when change comes knocking at the Pepins’ door, the family will never be quite the same again. Perceptive and funny, Blenheim Orchard is both human drama at its most powerful and an acute portrait of the times we live in.
‘Pears is a master at drawing significance out of the everyday … A lasting portrait of a family breaking apart’ Sunday Times
‘The sudden catastrophe is riveting: its aftermath is dramatic agony’ Times Literary Supplement
‘An unflinching portrait of the subtle mechanisms of a modern marriage’ Daily Telegraph
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Wake Up
‘Early nineteenth-century France had Balzac, we have Tim Pears’ The Times
For John, a potato isn’t just a staple food, it’s also something wondrous, the secret of his success and the key to the future. With his brother, Greg, he has turned his father’s greengrocery business into Spudnik, Britain’s largest dealer in potatoes. Now he wants to change the world by introducing, through potatoes, edible vaccines: plants genetically modified to provide an edible alternative to injections. But as John spins round and round the ring road avoiding his turn off to work he has to figure out how to tell his brother that deep in the Venezuelan jungle, volunteers have died during the latest illegal trials. Deaths that they have to find some way to hide. Wake Up is a book about our times, and how we are hurtling, almost silently, into a new age with implications that are unfathomable. Funny, fluent, and provocative it is a major new novel from one of our finest contemporary writers.
‘Haunting and drenched with a dark humour’ Daily Mail
‘What excited me was that feeling one only rarely gets as a reader, a kind of prickling excitement. This is it. This is the real thing’ A. S. Byatt
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http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/tim-pears/
First published in Great Britain 2018
This electronic edition published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Tim Pears, 2018
Tim Pears has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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eISBN 978 1 4088 9232 9
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