In the Place of Fallen Leaves - Hardcover

Pears, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 024113322X ISBN 13: 9780241133224

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 1993

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

Review

'Highly atmospheric ... It had an intoxicating, magical quality which completely beguiled me' Jeremy Paxman, Independent 'Constantly delightful and constantly surprising ... This novel is something completely new and exciting ... Comic and wry and elegiac and shrewd and thoughtful all at once. Please read it' A. S. Byatt 'The writing is so genuine. Nothing is posturing or romanticised. The characters really touched me. There's so much talent here' Barbara Trapido 'A remarkable first novel, which renders domestic detail fascinating and makes it quite possible to believe in magic' Sunday Times

From the Publisher

reviews
WINNER OF THE HAWTHORNDEN PRIZE AND THE RUTH HADDEN AWARD

'Constantly delightful and constantly surprising...This novel is something completely new and exciting...Comic and wry and elegiac and shrewd and thoughtful all at once. Please read it' A.S. BYATT, Daily Telegraph

'The writing is so genuine. Nothing is posturing or romanticised. The characters really touched me. There's so much talent here' BARBARA TRAPIDO

'Reminiscent of Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, the writing retains a very English scale...A triumph...Sensitive, heart-warming and hallucinatory' MAX RODENBECK, Financial Times

'It is most beautifully written, hypnotic as Proust, very funny and full of love that doesn't cloy...It is a dreamy, easy, wonderful read - and quite remarkable for a first novel' JANE GARDAM

'A remarkable first novel, which renders domestic detail fascinating and makes it quite possible to believe in magic' Sunday Times

'Highly atmospheric...It had an intoxicating, magical quality which completely beguiled me' JEREMY PAXMAN, Independent

'By turns elegiac, moving and extremely funny, Pears is also unafraid to muscle up his formidable powers of Proustian evocation. An extraordinarily promising debut' Time Out

'Long in abeyance, the English rural novel flourishes again in Tim Pears' story of a 13-year-old Devon farmgirl's confrontation with sex, death and the weather... an unusually welll-made novel which, through being less English than one would expect, produces a very English kind of magic' GILES FODEN, Independent on Sunday

'It is tricky coming across a novel you want to praise to the skies. Cool dispassionate criticism is much safer. But Tim Pears' "In The Place of Fallen Leaves" is more perfect than any first novel deserves to be' JENNIFER SELWAY, Observer

'An engaging, well-written and original novel. Pears could write about doing the washing up and make it interesting' PHILIP HENSHER, Guardian

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 024113322X
• ISBN 13: 9780241133224
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320