Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12822 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

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

From the Back Cover
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.

Customer Reviews

original and beautiful
This book deals with the familair theme of childhood, but in such an original way that it really makes one even look at their own childhood years in a new light. The characters are brilliantly deep and gentle, and the reader cannot help but marvel at them. The strange thing is that everything in the book seems so rare, yet the author is writing about relatively ordinary matters; nothing new, but in such a different and enchanting way you can't help reading on and on, until the end. This is the first book in such a long time that I have taken great care to read word by word, virtually worried of missing even one adjective. Every single word has such an important function for the plot and general feel. There are no uneccesary sentences, everywhere there are traces of a great talent. Nothing is exaggerated or understated; there are no cliche paragraphs that one finds even in the best of childhood memories. I haven't read a book like this in ages.

This is a beautiful novel
Please read this book. Because of it's lyrical language you'll think you're reading something gentle and subtle, until it makes you weep uncontrollably or guffaw at the antics of these unique, breathing characters. Then you find you are actually reading something extremely potent.The best books, I believe, are the ones that make the ordinary extraordinary. Tim Pears does this better than too many of the authors I've read in recent years.I loved this book.

An extended poetic masterpiece ...
Tim Pears has produced a sigh of joy in his masterly control of time and tone. We are not astonished to find that the assured tones of the narrator belong to a 10-year old girl - nor that these poetic reminiscences are in fact closer to our time than the telling lets us believe. What Pears does with time is imaginative, and takes us to a "great now of yesterday" with little feeling that we have been taken back in time - so skilfully has Pears's prose,and art, effaced linear time at all. One more pleat, one more fold has been opened to our view, and we wonder again at the power of the novel to reveal afresh, a wonder in a way of seeing - Pears leaves the novel, and us, with new life.