Tim Pears Books in Order

During a scorching summer in a Devon village, thirteen-year-old Alison longs to enter adulthood while daily life seems almost suspended. Her family's memories and her neighbors' lives reveal the layers of history surrounding her changing world.

After the Second World War, industrialist Charles Freeman builds a business and family in an English town. Across decades, his four children navigate love, loss, and adulthood as their fortunes reflect the country's changing economic and social life.

Beginning at midnight on New Year's Day 1997, strangers across England follow paths that gradually intersect. A politician, a mother-to-be, an amnesiac, and others experience a year of upheaval that reshapes their lives and reveals a nation changing.

Brothers John and Greg turn their family greengrocery into a major potato business, then develop genetically modified potatoes containing vaccines. Fatalities during illegal trials in Venezuela force John to confront the devastating consequences behind their promised breakthrough.

Ezra and Sheena Pepin juggle work, marriage, and three children in Oxford, each carrying different hopes and frustrations. Changes that intrude on their busy household expose strains within the family and threaten the life they have built.

Gardener Owen Ithell loses a daughter and a hand in a car crash, then becomes increasingly isolated from his family. Desperate to recover a sense of belonging, he takes his children on a journey toward his childhood home.

At a Christmas gathering in the Welsh Marches, Leonard and Rosemary Cannon invite their adult children to mark the possessions they want to inherit. Thirteen-year-old grandson Theo watches the apparently practical exercise reopen longstanding tensions and rivalries.

Three British servicemen parachute into occupied Slovenia in 1944 and join a group of Partisans. As evidence of atrocities emerges and enemy forces close in, loyalty, desire, and fragile relationships are tested by the approaching battle.

On a Somerset estate in 1911, gifted young horseman Leo Sercombe grows up among farm laborers and forms a bond with the landowner's daughter Charlotte. Seasonal work and rural traditions frame lives approaching the upheaval of war.

Banished from his childhood farm, thirteen-year-old Leo travels through Devon and Cornwall, relying on strangers and his instincts to survive. Back on the estate, Lottie turns toward science and nature while both struggle with their separation.

The First World War carries Leo Sercombe into naval service, while Lottie Prideaux challenges convention to pursue veterinary work. Loss, betrayal, and the changing postwar countryside shape their separate paths toward a possible reunion.