TIM PEARS

Ezra and Sheena Pepin live in Blenheim Orchard in North Oxford with their three children: fourteen-year-old Blaise entering the storm-world of adolescence, Hector, eleven 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. They are like everyone else: over-worked, worried about the children, trying to steer their marriage on an even keel. But change comes knocking at the Pepins' door. Ezra is asked to head a bold new campaign at his workplace that could jump-start his stagnant career; Sheena, in the meantime, decides to move the family to Brazil; and Blaise - restless and curious - takes her first, heady steps into the adult world of sex and desire. The Pepin family will never be quite the same again. Perceptive, thought-provoking, utterly compelling, "Blenheim Orchard" is human drama at its most powerful. It is also an acute portrait of the times we live in. Tim Pears is a skilled, observant and deeply humane writer - and he is writing at the top of his form.

Brought up in the Anglo-Welsh borders by an affectionate but alcoholic and feckless mother, Owen Ithell's sense of self is rooted in his long, vivid visits to his grandparents' small farm in the hills. There he is deeply impressed by his grandfather's primitive, cruel relationship with his animals and the land. As an adult he moves away from the country of his childhood to an English city where he builds a new life, working as a gardener.

The novel starts out with John, co-owner of a very successful potato company in England, driving out to see his brother (and business partner) to tell him about two fatalities that occured in an experiment to give people vaccines administered by genetically altered potatoes. John is frightened to what these deaths are going to mean to his company and he can't quite get himself to take the exit he's supposed to. Almost all of this shot novel takes place on that Monday in John's car as he thinks to himself about his life and what is going to happen now.

May 1944: High above the mountains of occupied Slovenia an aeroplane drops three British parachutists - brash MP Major Jack Farwell, radio operator Sid Dixon, and young academic Lieutenant Tom Freedman. Greeted upon arrival by a group of Partisans, the men are led off into the countryside.

Leonard and Rosemary Cannon summon their middle-aged offspring, along with partners and children, to the family home in the Welsh Marches for the Christmas holiday.

Brought up in the Anglo-Welsh borders by an affectionate but alcoholic and feckless mother, Owen Ithells sense of self is rooted in his long, vivid visits to his grandparents small farm in the hills.