Book description
Leonard and Rosemary Cannon summon their middle-aged offspring, along
with partners and children, to the family home in the Welsh Marches
for the Christmas holiday. As the gathered family settle in to their
first Christmas together for some years, the grown siblings - Rodney,
Jonny and Gwen - are surprised when they are invited to each put
stickers on the furniture and items they wish to inherit from their
parents.
Disputed Land is narrated by Leonard and Rosemary's
thirteen-year-old grandson, Theo, who observes how from these innocent
beginnings age-old fissures open up in the relationships of those
around him. Looking back at this Christmas gathering from his own
middle-age - a narrator at once nostalgic and naïve - Theo Cannon
remembers his imperious grandmother Rosemary, alpha-male uncle Jonny,
abominable twin cousins Xan and Baz; he recalls his love for his
grandfather Leonard and the burgeoning feelings for his cousin Holly.
And he asks himself the question: if a single family cannot solve the
problem of what it bequeaths to future generations, then what chance
does a whole society have of leaving the world intact?
Born in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon, left school at sixteen and
had countless menial jobs before studying at the National Film and
Television School. He is the author of six previous novels, including
In the Place of Fallen Leaves
, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award,
In a Land of Plenty
, which was made into a ten part drama series for the BBC, and, most
recently,
Landed
. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature,
and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and has
taught creative writing at Ruskin College and elsewhere. He lives in
Oxford with his wife and children.
