Showing results by author "Tim Pears" in All Categories

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.

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 how can the future be imagined, in the face of such unimaginable change?

1912. Leo is on a journey. Aged 13 and banished from the secluded farm of his childhood, he travels through Devon, grazing on berries and sleeping in copses. Behind him lies the past, and before him the West Country, spread out like a tapestry. But a wanderer is never alone for long, and soon Leo is taken in by gypsies. Yet he knows he cannot linger and must forge on to Penzance. Life on the estate continues as usual, yet nothing is as it was. Lottie’s father is distracted by the promise of new love, and Lottie is increasingly absorbed in the natural world. And of course, Leo is absent.

Britain, AD 75. Quintus, long exiled from his people, has travelled great odysseys in the retinue of a powerful Roman. Though a citizen of nowhere, is a man of reason, fluent in many languages. Olwen, imperious tribal royalty, is rooted in her native land – a volatile warrior, fiercely attached to the natural world. Given away by her father as part of a peace treaty, Olwen flees during the night, taking Quintus with her. Hunted by an army, the two make their way across the country, living off the land, heading for the western shore.

Owen Ithell’s sense of self is rooted in his long, vivid visits to his grandparents’ small farm in the Welsh hills. As an adult he moves away from the country and meets Mel, with whom he has children. He believes he has found happiness. But following a car accident, in which his daughter is killed and he loses a hand, the course of his life is changed for ever. In his despair, he resolves to reconnect with both his past and the natural world.

Ezra and Sheena Pepin live in Blenheim Orchard in North Oxford with their three children: 14-year-old Blaise, entering the stormy world of adolescence; Hector, 11 and precociously clever; and sweet Louie, three years old and the family tyrant. Ezra, a benignly disaffected employee at Isis Water, has abandoned his calling as an anthropologist; Sheena has inadvertently found hers running a travel company. And then change comes knocking at their door, and the Pepin family are never quite the same again.

Bloomsbury presents Chemistry and Other Stories by Tim Pears, read by Mike Grady. As good as any modern fiction you will read this year' Sunday Times, Best new short story collections A wife compulsively digs in her garden. Two brothers, long estranged, reunite for a terse, heady summer. A woman...