In the Place of Fallen Leaves [Paperback]

'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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Set in a tiny, steep village near Dartmoor, remote and scarcely touched by the late 20th century, except for an incursion of hippies, the central situation in this book is a hallucinatory hot summer, remembered by an adult narrator, Alison. The book switches through time as Alison remembers.

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

It is the hottest summer of the twentieth century. In a faraway Devon village hidden in a valley, the world has stopped turning and time is slipping backward. 'This idn't nothing' Alison's grandmother tells her, recalling the electric summer after the war when the earth swallowed lambs. But Alison knows her memory is lying: this is far worse. She thinks that time has stopped altogether, when all she wants is to enter the real world of adulthood. In fact, in the cruel heat of that summer, time is creeping towards her, closing in around the valley.

Tim Pears
Tim Pears was born in 1956. He grew up in Devon, and left school at sixteen. He has worked in a wide variety of jobs and is a graduate of the National Film and Television School. His first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award. His second novel, In a Land of Plenty, has been adapted for television and is now a major BBC television series. His third novel is A Revolution of the Sun.