In the Orchard, the Swallows

by Peter Hobbs

Award-winning short story writer Peter Hobbs is back, this time with a beautiful heart-wrenching short novel set in Pakistan. After fifteen years of brutality in a prison that have marked and tortured him, made him into a broken man with lost dreams and a forgotten youth, one image has sustained him all these years – that of a girl, his one true love, a star-crossed lover, maybe – all he remembers is that she filled his life with dumbstruck wonder and now, years later, when innocence is long forgotten and his body and mind have endured all manner all cruelty, what of them both, then?

He sits in the beautiful orchard of a man who has taken pity on his sack of bones and weakness and writes to her of everything that has befallen him since they last saw each other.

With simple, considered prose and a plethora of beautiful descriptions of fruit, trees and people, mixed with the horrors of humanity, this is a moving and sad and captivating book.

Publisher: Faber

Peter Hobbs

Peter Hobbs grew up in Cornwall and Yorkshire, and lives in London. The Short Day Dying, his first novel, won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

He has also published a collection of short stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train (Faber, 2006), from which 'Deep Blue Sea' is taken. One of his stories was included in Picador’s New Writing 13 anthology (2005), edited by Ali Smith and Toby Litt.

Peter has recently been reading the following collections, from which he particularly recommends:

'Charlie in the House of Rue' from Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies (Dalkey Archive Press, US)

The title story from Tom Bissell's God Lives in St Petersburg (Faber)

'Hanalei Bay' from Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Harvill Secker)

Peter Hobbs