In the Place of Fallen Leaves - Softcover

Tim Pears

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747578362 ISBN 13: 9780747578369

Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Tim Pears is the author of Wake Up (Bloomsbury, 2002), In a Land of Plenty (adapted into a major BBC TV series in 2001) and A Revolution of the Sun. He lives in Oxford with his wife and children.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0747578362
• ISBN 13: 9780747578369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352