'Blenheim Orchard' is both human drama at its most powerful and an acute portrait of the times we live in.
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.
