Blenheim Orchard cover art

Blenheim Orchard

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Blenheim Orchard

By: Tim Pears
Narrated by: Paul Herzberg
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About this listen

 Ezra and Sheena Pepin live in Blenheim Orchard in North Oxford with their three children: 14-year-old Blaise, entering the stormy world of adolescence; Hector, 11 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 just like everyone else ¿ over-worked, worried about the children, and trying to keep their marriage on an even keel. And then change comes knocking at their door, and the Pepin family are never quite the same again.

©2007 Tim Pears (P)2007 Isis Publishing Ltd. Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

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Critic reviews

"Tim Pears has a God-given gift for characterisation, a superb sense of place, and a generosity of spirit which is genuinely uplifting." ( Time Out)
All stars
Most relevant
The narrator seemsto read 'by the line' with inappropriate pauses and mispronunciations - he's lazy; obviously didn't read each section in advance. This is a shame as the book itself is good.

Good book, dire narration

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I've been a subsriber of Audible for almost a year and have been impressed with everything - except this! It is a truely awful recording. The reader skips words, restarts sentences and has a dire delivery - if there was a way to get my money back on this one - I would. shame - as I love Pears books in general.

Truely AWFUL recording

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I'm about an hour into this audiobook and for the first time in a longish history of listening to novels I am considering giving up. Nothing wrong with the writing or the plot. But why this narrator was chosen is completely beyond me. I think one of my kids could have read the story better. His reading is painfully, infuriatingly stilted. He seems to manufacture extra syllables in words. His emphasis and pauses within sentences often totally obscure the meaning. You spend the whole time focussed on how badly he is narrating, rather than getting lost in the story.

It really is unforgiveably bad. If I were Tim Pears, I'd sue.

What a shame

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