Press

What the critics say

This novel really sang to me....artfully sculpted, more layered, more powerfully elegiac. This is a really beautiful novel.
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Pears is a remarkable prose stylist...Landed offers rich pickings.
- The Times

Pears is back on top form in this beautifully crafted story...Thrillingly well-observed...The ending is a powerful blend of poignancy and moral ambivalence... If one of the tasks of a novelist is to open our eyes to the world around us, Pears has executed that task with rare aplomb.
- Sunday Telegraph

Beautifully and evocatively written
- Scotsman

powerful: it shows the grief that overwhelms a parent at the death of a child and...the darkness that lies beneath the surface of a superficially happy family...There is no denying Pears' achievement in the character of Owen, a raw, desperate man even before he is filled with grief, and his deeply poetic descriptions of an old-fashioned life on the land.
- Daily Telegraph

A story of love and fatherhood that almost seems Hardyesque...set against the bucolic splendour of flashback scenes...[Owen's] kidnapping of his children may be shocking but it feels somehow legitimate, and his animal hunger for fatherhood is moving...Landed is a turbulent, haunting story, which forces the reader to examine different perceptions of goodness and responsibility. It explores the fragility of family life, using this to reflect on the opposition between society and the natural world. Pears's prose is quietly mellifluous, particularly when evoking the pastoral, and the multi-perspective device supports the plot well...Landed draws us painfully into Owen's predicament, his teetering between salvation and disaster.
- Times Literary Supplement