A tender and wise collection of stories, by the author of the critically acclaimed West Country Trilogy

'As good as any modern fiction you will read this year' Sunday Times, Best new short story collections A wife compulsively digs in her garden. Two brothers, long estranged, reunite for a terse, heady summer. A woman flies to Krakow to see her adult son. At dusk, a teenage girl pushes her dying mother out into the sea. A small boy sits on his own in the cinema, entranced by the cowboys who light up the screen. With these short stories, Tim Pears illuminates a series of blazing moments in quiet lives – the tragic, strange, funny and beautiful fragments that make and unmake us – and shines a light into the gulfs that lie between us and those who should know us best.

"The stories have a strong sense of the reality of rural life and its underbelly, the curious dynamics of families, and an almost mystical feel for mortality. These are unforced and spacious pieces, totally sure-footed in their telling and as good as any modern fiction you will read this year" - The Sunday Times, The best new short story collections for June 2021

"At the heart of his collection lies Chemistry, a compelling portrait of family and migration" - Tablet

"He heads into the contemporary world and the moments that can darken or illuminate a life … These stories … are all given the same wise consideration, and described with an unerring, kindly exactitude" - Daily Mail

"Lyrical and gentle, with a theme of familial interplay" - Country Life, Book of the Week

"PRAISE FOR TIM PEARS: Goodness, Tim Pears writes beautifully … the descriptions of rural life, executed with painterly exactness, are a constant delight. The prose really sings" - Mail on Sunday

"His prose is luminous, drawing in the reader … Pears’ fiction has been likened to Thomas Hardy’s, and the comparison is apposite ... Powerful, vivid and humane" - Observer

"Tim Pears deserves a place among the best rural writers … An exemplary historical novelist with a Romantic eye for nature ... This heady walk through the forgotten lanes of England thrums with life" - The Times

"A gifted storyteller, steeped in country lore and the beauty of ordinary events. Like Thomas Hardy whose kindred spirit quietly animates these pages, he is concerned with the dignity of work, the force of destiny and the consequences of human passion" - New York Times

"Reminiscent of Faulkner and García Márquez, the writing retains a very English scale … Sensitive, heart-warming and hallucinatory" - Financial Times

"Highly atmospheric … It had an intoxicating, magical quality which completely beguiled me" - Independent