In 1952, Charles and Mary Freeman marry, take possession of a mansion high on a hill overlooking a small industrial town somewhere in the heart of England, and begin their family. This, Tim Pears' second novel, is the sweeping, rich, and astonishing tale of the first 30 years of their lives and the lives of their four children, Simon, James, Robert, and Alice. Compellingly drawn and infinitely resonant, the stories of these four children, stories of both joy and tragedy, create a generous epic of the life of a family, and of a country.
Author
Born in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon and left school at sixteen. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled jobs: trainee welder, assistant librarian, trainee reporter, archaeological worker, fruit picker, nursing assistant in a psychiatric ward, groundsman in a hotel & caravan park, fencer, driver, sorter of mail, builder, painter & decorator, night porter, community video maker and art gallery manager in Devon, Wales, France, Norfolk and Oxford. Always he was writing, and in time making short films. He took the Directing course at the National Film and Television School, graduating in the same month that his first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was published, in 1993.
