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Chemistry and Other Stories (Paperback)
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Chemistry and Other Stories (Paperback)

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£8.99
Paperback 272 Pages
Published: 23/06/2022
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'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.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781526623416
Number of pages: 272
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

The stories have a strong sense of the reality of rural life and its underbelly, the curious dynamics of families, and analmost 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

This is it. This is the real thing. This is whatever I mean by the work of a born writer … Comic and wry and elegiac and shrewd and thoughtful all at once. Please read it - A S Byatt

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 - Hannah Beckerman, 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

The writing is so genuine. Nothing is posturing or romanticised. The characters really touched me. There's so much talent here - Barbara Trapido

It is most beautifully written, hypnotic as Proust, very funny and full of love that doesn't cloy … It is a dreamy, easy, wonderful read - Jane Gardam

Makes it quite possible to believe in magic - Sunday Times

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

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“Definitely worth a read!”

I usually don't read short stories but was intrigued by "Chemistry and Other Stories" by TIm Pears. It's a mixed bag - some stories resonated with me better than others. Definitely worth a read!

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 8

“An amazing collection of gripping stories”

chemistry and other stories by Tim Pears
This is a wonderful collection of short stories. It was a brilliant book it had me captivated from the very first line. This authors writing style is amazing he really creates... More

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 5
Amalia Gkavea

“A volume that kept me hooked.”

‘’Some things are better left unsaid.’’

A collection of short stories that easily falls into the genre of Literary Fiction, dealing with themes that vary from the ‘writer’s soul’ to the bond between family which... More

Paperback edition
Helpful? Upvote 2

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