In/Place/Fallen Leaves - Softcover

Pears, Tim

3.82

487 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552995363 ISBN 13: 9780552995368

Publisher: Corgi, 1994

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A Devon village during the hot, dry days of a devastating 1984 summer drought forms the backdrop to the story of thirteen-year-old Alison, youngest child of prosperous farmers, her family, and her friendship with the son of a local viscount. Winner of the 1994 Hawthornden Prize for Literature. 15,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

Tim Pears is the author of eight novels: In the Light of Morning, In the Place of Fallen Leaves (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award), Wake Up, Blenheim Orchard, In a Land of Plenty(made into a ten-part BBC series), A Revolution of the Sun, Landed (shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012 and the 2011 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, winner of the MJA Open Book Awards 2011), and Disputed Land. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and has taught creative writing at Ruskin College and elsewhere. He lives in Oxford with his wife and children. timpears.com

From Publishers Weekly:

In this piercingly beautiful, fiercely lyrical first novel, narrator Alison Freemantle, 13, awakens to love, sexuality, death, class divisions and the mystery of life on a farm in a Devonshire village during the summer of 1984. Alison's father drinks himself into a stupor on rough cider and neglects her overworked, unhappy mother. Pamela, her older sister who's always preoccupied with dating, seems remote. Her two brothers-Ian, an insomniac chess prodigy, and Tom, a bumpkin who feels closer to animals than to people until he falls swooningly, comically in love-will come to blows over the same girl. Meanwhile, Jonathan, a viscount's son, rescues Alison from drowning, but their platonic friendship is declared off-limits after a barn they explore accidentally catches fire. Through stories told to Alison by her crippled grandmother, the lives of the girl's relatives and of villagers-their tragedies, courtships and crises, over 50 years-are revealed. Pears evokes unspoken bonds of love, a sense of community, organic connectedness to nature in a remarkable debut, a work shot through with moments of great tenderness, beauty and emotional power.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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