In the Place of Fallen Leaves

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.


Genre: Literary Fiction

"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

"'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

"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

"An engaging, well-written and original novel. Pears could write about doing the washing up and make it interesting." - Philip Hensher

"The writing is so genuine. Nothing is posturing or romanticised. The characters really touched me. There's so much talent here." - Barbara Trapido