Tim Pears Books In Order

Publication Order of The West Country Trilogy Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Tim Pears was born in the year 1963 in Devon and left school when he was sixteen years old. He is a graduate of the National Film and Television School, and has directed quite a few short films. He has worked all kinds of jobs from painter, decorator, farm laborer, nurse in a mental hospital, college night porter, and many others.

With cinema, sport has been a vital recreation for Tim. He was a mediocre tennis player, a third-rate footballer, and is still a poor ping-pong player, but is rather fortunate that better players allow him to join. He coached a boys’ football team and it provided him with a great source of pleasure, and is still an avid spectator of the amazing human invention that football really is.

His debut novel, called “In the Place of Leaves”, was released in the year 1993. He writes literary fiction, including the “West Country” trilogy. Besides writing novels, he also wrote a script for a feature film, called “Loop”, which was released in the year 1999.

Tim Pears was Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature from 2002 until 2003. He was also one of the Royal Literary Fellow at Oxford Brookes University twice from 2006 until 2008 and again from 2011 until 2012. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Pears has taught creative writing at Ruskin College, for the Arvon Foundation, and Oxford University, as well as other places.

“In the Place of Fallen Leaves” won both the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award and a Hawthornden Prize for Literature. “Landed” was awarded the MJA Open Book Award.

“In a Land of Plenty” has been adapted into a ten episode television series and is one of the BBC’s major programs.

“The Horseman” is the first novel in the “West Country” series, which was released in the year 2017. The year is 1911. In a forgotten valley along the Devon-Somerset border, the seasons play out, marked just by the rituals of the farming calendar. Leopold Sercombe, twelve years old, skips school to help his dad, a carter. Leo, both skinny and pale, dreams of a job on the stud farm on the estate.

He is breaking a colt for his dad when a boy dressed in riding boots, a Homburg, and breeches shows up. Looking under the stranger’s hat, he finds Miss Charlotte, the daughter of the Master. So starts the friendship between the two, bound by their deep love of horses, but divided by rigid social boundaries. Ones that start becoming more and more difficult to navigate while they approach their adolescence.

“The Wanderers” is the second novel in the “West Country” series, which was released in the year 2018. The year is 1912. Leo is currently going on a journey. He is thirteen years old and has been banished from the secluded farm from his childhood, he goes through Devon, just sleeping in copses and grazing on the berries he finds. Behind him is the past, and before him is just the West Country, which is spread out like a tapestry. A wanderer is never all alone and by himself for too long, try as he might, and quickly he finds that he is taken in by a band of gypsies with their horses, wagons, and rather vivid attire. He realizes that he cannot linger, and has to forge onward to Penzance, towards the western horizon.

Lottie is home. Life on the estate continues like usual, yet nothing’s like it was. Her dad is distracted by the prospect of new love and Lottie is getting more and more absorbed in the natural world. The habits of predators, the wild flowers growing in the meadow, and the mysteries of anatomy. Of course, Leo is nowhere around. How are the two youngsters ever going to find each other again?

Tim Pears is able to reach some new heights with this one, it is both sharply focused and transcendental. It reveals both the brutality and beauty that coexist with each other in nature. It is charged with some raw energy and some light humor, as well as being searching and focused.

“The Redeemed” is the third novel in the “West Country” series, which was released in the year 2019. The year is 1916. The world has gone to war, and Leo Sercombe, who hauls coal on board the HMS Queen Mary, is very far away from his own home. The unchanging and wild West Country roads from his boyhood seem like a long way away from life aboard a battle cruiser. Skimming through those same West Country roads on her motorcycle, Lottie Prideaux defies the expectations of both her sex and class while she studies covertly to become a vet.

In this world torn asunder by war, everything is currently dancing in flux. How can the old ways of life continue to survive, and how is it possible to imagine the future, in the face of unimaginable change?

“In the Place of the Fallen Leaves” is the first stand alone novel, which was released in the year 1993. This horribly hot summer, it all seems to be slowing way down in this tiny Devon village where Alison calls home, and it is like the sun has been pouring hot glue over the village. This idn’t nothin her grandmother informs her, as she recalls a drought when the earth swallowed up lambs, and the summer after the war happened as people got electric shocks off of each other.

Alison is certain that her grandma’s memory is lying, as this is much worse. She feels that time has stopped right when she wants to enter the adult world. In fact, in summer’s cruel heat, time is creeping toward her, and closes in all around the valley.

This novel is constantly surprising and new as well as constantly delightful and exciting. It is a most beautifully written and hypnotic, as well as both funny and full of love but is never cloying. With this one, Tim Pears wrote an engaging story and it is clear that he could write about anything and make it interesting to read about.