Blenheim Orchard

By Tim Pears

Published Jan 2010

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: overworked, worried about the children, trying to steer their marriage on an even keel.

But change comes knocking at the Pepin’s door. Ezra is asked to head a bold new campaign at his workplace that could jump-start his stagnant career; Sheena in the meantime has an idea that she believes will refresh and renew her family; 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 same again…

Perceptive, funny and thought provoking, Blenheim Orchard is both human drama at its most powerful and an acute portrait of the times we live in.