Chemistry and Other Stories

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Chemistry and Other Stories by Tim Pears, read by Mike Grady.

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.

Critics Review

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
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
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
Independent

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