"A wonderful novel. . . Tim Pears combines a down-to-earth rendering of the realities of rural life with a magical sense of another world beyond our everyday experience."--Wall Street JournalFrom acclaimed author Tim Pears, the first novel in a sweeping historical trilogy, beginning in rural, pre-WWI England.Somerset, 1911. The forces of war are building across Europe, but this pocket of England, where the rhythms of lives are dict...

'A beautiful love story with an incredible sense of place' - The Times'Compact and engrossing . . . a pleasure of a novel' - Daily MailBritain, AD 72. Quintus, a slave long exiled from his people, has travelled to far-flung places under the command of a powerful Roman. Though a citizen of nowhere, he is a man of reason, fluent in many languages. Olwen, a volatile warrior, is rooted in her native land.Given away by ...

The collected trilogy of Tim Pears's spellbinding chronicle of love, exile and belonging in a world on the brink of changeTHE HORSEMANA beautiful, hypnotic pastoral novel reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, about an unexpected friendship between two children, set in Devon in 1911'A novel that is as moving and profound as it is evocative of the landscape and period' Observer

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. I...

From the prize-winning author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves comes a beautiful, hypnotic pastoral novel reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, about an unexpected friendship between two children, set in Devon in 1911In 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 ...

In a small town in the middle of England, the aftermath of the Second World War brings change. For ambitious industrialist Charles Freeman, it offers new opportunities and marriage toMary. He buys the big house on the hill and nails his aspirations to the future.In quick succession, three sons and a daughter bring life to the big house and, with it, the seeds of family joy and tragedy. As the children grow and struggle with the hazards of adulthood, Charles' business expands in dir...

Brought up in the Anglo–Welsh borders by an affectionate but alcoholic and feckless mother, Owen Ithell's sense of self is rooted in his long, vivid visits to his grandparents' small farm in the hills. There he is deeply impressed by his grandfather's primitive, cruel relationship with his animals and the land.As an adult he moves away from the country of his childhood to an English city where he builds a new life, working as a gardener. He meets Mel, they have children. He believe...

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 frie...

It begins at the stroke of midnight on the first day of 1997. As the year turns, a group of disparate individuals from different backgrounds, from all corners of the country, are about to embark on separate journeys which will converge over the course of the next twelve months: among them, Rebecca - mother-to-be, Sam - amnesiac, Roderick - Conservative MP, Jack - lorry driver, Martha - cat burglar, Ben - paraplegic child, Solo - his abandoned father.At the end of that year, their l...

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 ...

The final installment in Tim Pears's spellbinding chronicle of love, exile and belonging in a world on the brink of change.It is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary, is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battlecruiser—a universe of well-oiled steel, of smoke and spray and sweat, wher...

It is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary, is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battlecruiser. Skimming through those West Country roads on her motorcycle, Lottie Prideaux defies the expectations of her class and sex as she covertly studies to be a vet. In a world torn asunder by war, everything dances in flux: how can the old ways life survive, and h...