Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : P : Pears, Tim

Shop Categories

...P

In the Place of Fallen Leaves

Tim Pears
In the Place of Fallen Leaves

Tim Pears
Blenheim Orchard

Tim Pears
In a Land of Plenty

Tim Pears
In the Place of Fallen Leaves: A Novel

Tim Pears
Blenheim Orchard

Tim Pears
Wake Up

Tim Pears

There is a grubby, Lawrencean, earthiness about Wake Up, Tim Pears' fourth novel. Rotting vegetables, mud, urine, excrement, vomit and semen jostle for space in an invective first-person narrative. The central character John Sharp is an unnerving, unpleasant but often amusing raconteur. He's the misogynistic, misanthropic Oxford-educated brains behind Spudnik, Britain's largest potato dealers. Despite his disdain for the bulk of the word's inhabitants, he has unwavering faith in a scheme to cultivate vaccines in genetically modified spuds. The book opens with John driving to work having just learnt that two people have died in dubious trials of the prototype. Uncertain about how to break the news to Greg, his brother and (brawny) business partner; he becomes mesmerised by a ring road. As he spins relentlessly around it, in a subtle but insistent echo of the nature's own cycles, he starts to unfurl a highly questionable version of his life story. By the second page John has already confessed to lying and continually retracts, denies and reworks his own version of events, leaving the reader, as the silent, omnipresent interlocutor, to decide quite how believable any part of his story is.
Potato lore permeates his monologue--even seeping into a marvellously tuberous description of the Sharp clan's physiognomy: "We were a plug-ugly Anglo-Saxon family. Yes, we were. White and skinny or white and lumpy: that was the choice our genes offered us." Progeny, human and vegetable in John's case, is Pears' overriding theme. There's a remarkable neatness here. Pears is very adept at tidy but believable contrasts: John's scientism is marked against his wife Lily's New Ageism; Lily's adventurous cooking is in turn compared to John's mother's ability to drain food of its taste, while Greg's entrepreneurial vigour is sharply contrasted with their late father's inability to get beyond running a single fruit and veg stall. These binary motifs drive the novel; making John a robust, if sometimes obnoxious, figure and giving the whole thing a pleasing cohesion. There's a slightly annoying, final twist (Frankenspud turns out to be John's second genetic monstrosity) but this inventive and actually very funny novel asks serious questions about the responsibilities, and possible dangers, of scientific "progress". --Travis Elborough
In the Place of Fallen Leaves

Tim Pears
A Revolution of the Sun

Tim Pears

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
Blenheim Orchard

Tim Pears
Wake Up

Tim Pears

There is a grubby, Lawrencean, earthiness about Wake Up, Tim Pears' fourth novel. Rotting vegetables, mud, urine, excrement, vomit and semen jostle for space in an invective first-person narrative. The central character John Sharp is an unnerving, unpleasant but often amusing raconteur. He's the misogynistic, misanthropic Oxford-educated brains behind Spudnik, Britain's largest potato dealers. Despite his disdain for the bulk of the word's inhabitants, he has unwavering faith in a scheme to cultivate vaccines in genetically modified spuds. The book opens with John driving to work having just learnt that two people have died in dubious trials of the prototype. Uncertain about how to break the news to Greg, his brother and (brawny) business partner; he becomes mesmerised by a ring road. As he spins relentlessly around it, in a subtle but insistent echo of the nature's own cycles, he starts to unfurl a highly questionable version of his life story. By the second page John has already confessed to lying and continually retracts, denies and reworks his own version of events, leaving the reader, as the silent, omnipresent interlocutor, to decide quite how believable any part of his story is.
Potato lore permeates his monologue--even seeping into a marvellously tuberous description of the Sharp clan's physiognomy: "We were a plug-ugly Anglo-Saxon family. Yes, we were. White and skinny or white and lumpy: that was the choice our genes offered us." Progeny, human and vegetable in John's case, is Pears' overriding theme. There's a remarkable neatness here. Pears is very adept at tidy but believable contrasts: John's scientism is marked against his wife Lily's New Ageism; Lily's adventurous cooking is in turn compared to John's mother's ability to drain food of its taste, while Greg's entrepreneurial vigour is sharply contrasted with their late father's inability to get beyond running a single fruit and veg stall. These binary motifs drive the novel; making John a robust, if sometimes obnoxious, figure and giving the whole thing a pleasing cohesion. There's a slightly annoying, final twist (Frankenspud turns out to be John's second genetic monstrosity) but this inventive and actually very funny novel asks serious questions about the responsibilities, and possible dangers, of scientific "progress". --Travis Elborough
A Revolution of the Sun

Tim Pears

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
A Revolution of the Sun

Tim Pears

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
In the Place of Fallen Leaves: A Novel

Tim Pears
In a Land of Plenty

Tim Pears
Wake Up

Tim Pears

There is a grubby, Lawrencean, earthiness about Wake Up, Tim Pears' fourth novel. Rotting vegetables, mud, urine, excrement, vomit and semen jostle for space in an invective first-person narrative. The central character John Sharp is an unnerving, unpleasant but often amusing raconteur. He's the misogynistic, misanthropic Oxford-educated brains behind Spudnik, Britain's largest potato dealers. Despite his disdain for the bulk of the word's inhabitants, he has unwavering faith in a scheme to cultivate vaccines in genetically modified spuds. The book opens with John driving to work having just learnt that two people have died in dubious trials of the prototype. Uncertain about how to break the news to Greg, his brother and (brawny) business partner; he becomes mesmerised by a ring road. As he spins relentlessly around it, in a subtle but insistent echo of the nature's own cycles, he starts to unfurl a highly questionable version of his life story. By the second page John has already confessed to lying and continually retracts, denies and reworks his own version of events, leaving the reader, as the silent, omnipresent interlocutor, to decide quite how believable any part of his story is.
Potato lore permeates his monologue--even seeping into a marvellously tuberous description of the Sharp clan's physiognomy: "We were a plug-ugly Anglo-Saxon family. Yes, we were. White and skinny or white and lumpy: that was the choice our genes offered us." Progeny, human and vegetable in John's case, is Pears' overriding theme. There's a remarkable neatness here. Pears is very adept at tidy but believable contrasts: John's scientism is marked against his wife Lily's New Ageism; Lily's adventurous cooking is in turn compared to John's mother's ability to drain food of its taste, while Greg's entrepreneurial vigour is sharply contrasted with their late father's inability to get beyond running a single fruit and veg stall. These binary motifs drive the novel; making John a robust, if sometimes obnoxious, figure and giving the whole thing a pleasing cohesion. There's a slightly annoying, final twist (Frankenspud turns out to be John's second genetic monstrosity) but this inventive and actually very funny novel asks serious questions about the responsibilities, and possible dangers, of scientific "progress". --Travis Elborough
In a Land of Plenty

Tim Pears
In a Land of Plenty

Tim Pears
Wake Up

Tim Pears

There is a grubby, Lawrencean, earthiness about Wake Up, Tim Pears' fourth novel. Rotting vegetables, mud, urine, excrement, vomit and semen jostle for space in an invective first-person narrative. The central character John Sharp is an unnerving, unpleasant but often amusing raconteur. He's the misogynistic, misanthropic Oxford-educated brains behind Spudnik, Britain's largest potato dealers. Despite his disdain for the bulk of the word's inhabitants, he has unwavering faith in a scheme to cultivate vaccines in genetically modified spuds. The book opens with John driving to work having just learnt that two people have died in dubious trials of the prototype. Uncertain about how to break the news to Greg, his brother and (brawny) business partner; he becomes mesmerised by a ring road. As he spins relentlessly around it, in a subtle but insistent echo of the nature's own cycles, he starts to unfurl a highly questionable version of his life story. By the second page John has already confessed to lying and continually retracts, denies and reworks his own version of events, leaving the reader, as the silent, omnipresent interlocutor, to decide quite how believable any part of his story is.
Potato lore permeates his monologue--even seeping into a marvellously tuberous description of the Sharp clan's physiognomy: "We were a plug-ugly Anglo-Saxon family. Yes, we were. White and skinny or white and lumpy: that was the choice our genes offered us." Progeny, human and vegetable in John's case, is Pears' overriding theme. There's a remarkable neatness here. Pears is very adept at tidy but believable contrasts: John's scientism is marked against his wife Lily's New Ageism; Lily's adventurous cooking is in turn compared to John's mother's ability to drain food of its taste, while Greg's entrepreneurial vigour is sharply contrasted with their late father's inability to get beyond running a single fruit and veg stall. These binary motifs drive the novel; making John a robust, if sometimes obnoxious, figure and giving the whole thing a pleasing cohesion. There's a slightly annoying, final twist (Frankenspud turns out to be John's second genetic monstrosity) but this inventive and actually very funny novel asks serious questions about the responsibilities, and possible dangers, of scientific "progress". --Travis Elborough
In a Land of Plenty

Tim Pears