In the Place of Fallen Leaves

WINNER OF THE HAWTHORNDEN PRIZE AND THE RUTH HADDEN MEMORIAL AWARD

Tim Pears' prize-winning, critically acclaimed debut about a hot summer in a Devon village where time seems to stand still

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.

“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
Reminiscent of Faulkner and García Márquez, the writing retains a very English scale … Sensitive, heart-warming and hallucinatory Financial Times
More perfect than any first novel deserves to be Observer
Most beautifully written, hypnotic as Proust, very funny and full of love that doesn’t cloy … A dreamy, easy, wonderful read – and quite remarkable for a first novel -- Jane Gardam
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
A very English kind of magic -- Giles Foden
Tim Pears' beautiful first novel brings just a touch of Macondo to rural Devon in the heatwave of 1984 -- Salman Rushdie
Refreshing, even revelatory … A work that is dense with detail and richly evocative … A very impressive performance -- Jane Smiley Washington Post
Highly atmospheric … It had an intoxicating, magical quality which completely beguiled me -- Jeremy Paxman
Engaging, well-written and original -- Philip Hensher Guardian
Remarkable … a gorgeous tapestry of country life as it was and, perhaps in a few places, still is. And it is tough and trenchant enough to be enjoyed by people who are not otherwise interested in rural idylls Sunday Telegraph

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

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