A Revolution of the Sun - Softcover

Pears, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552998621 ISBN 13: 9780552998628

Publisher: Black Swan, 2001

Synopsis

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 lives will have changed irrevocably, some for better, some for worse, but changed nonetheless. They cannot know what will happen to them, but there is an inevitability in their shared destiny that will prove impossible to withstand... A Revolution of the Sun tells the story of one momentous year through the eyes of the people who lived it. It is not only their stories, but also the anatomy of a nation in flux. Ambitious, powerful, irresistible, it is the work of a writer at the peak of his powers and once again demonstrates Pears to be a great contemporary novelist.

About this title

Review:

In A Revolution of the Sun, Amnesiac Sam Caine loses his diary, his only hold on memory, in a greasy spoon. Rebecca Menotti takes a brief respite from her party-drugged life in London to visit her widowed father in Bristol. Hyper-intelligent dropout Joe Snow does his menial job in Mr Bone's Oxford laboratory, financed by the Al-Shalir twins. Tory MP Roderick Pastille (born Roderigo Pastile) fights gay rights at a Cabinet meeting while fantasising about transvestites. Cat burglar Martha Polkinghorne remembers her wrestling-obsessed upbringing. Solo O'Brien tries to raise his paraplegic child Ben on a Manchester housing estate, while the kids at Ben's school try to tattoo his head. Jack Knighton lives in thrall to his wife Miranda's demands. Slowly, as they move through 1997, their stories start to overlap and intersect.

Coming after In The Place of Fallen Leaves and In A Land of Plenty, Tim Pears' new novel is large, ambitious and potentially unwieldy. The opening pages, as he frantically introduces all his stories in the first hours of New Year's Day 1997, are (perhaps inevitably) forced. However, as he gives himself the space to develop each story--and each has its own tone, its own pace, its own obsessions--Pears convinces that he can indeed carry off his ambition. Veering wildly between tongue-in-cheek satire (Pastile / Pastille), near-whimsy (Martha's wrestling-obsessed father), standard TV drama fare (the amnesiac) and the truly moving (Ben O'Brien), Pears nonetheless makes them all necessary parts of the whole. His plot lines are all ultimately about individuals, most of them loners, but in their attempts to make contact through the book there is a hope of something beyond individualism, beyond loneliness. --Alan Stewart

Review:

" A hugely ambitious and enjoyable novel." - "The Times" "A hugely ambitious and enjoyable novel." -"The Times"

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Swan
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0552998621
• ISBN 13: 9780552998628
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576