BLENHEIM ORCHARD

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.