Britain

Peter Hobbs

Peter Hobbs grew up in Cornwall and Yorkshire, England. His debut novel, The Short Day Dying, was published by Faber in 2005. It won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A collection of stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train, was published in 2006.

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Latest reviews

— May 6 2015

This recently released novel, about a Pakistani boy imprisoned for falling in love with the wrong girl, is both exquisitely written and surprisingly inspiring. At 137 pages, it weighs in as one of the giants of 2014.

— Aug 11 2014

The narrator of this fable-like tale has been released from prison in Pakistan after fifteen years and recuperates with the help of a benevolent stranger. Every day, he visits the orchard of his family home, an idyllic place where he fell in love as a teen-ager. The novella...

— Mar 25 2014

In the Orchard, The Swallows, is a slim, lyrical book that can be read in a sitting or two, about a young man released from a Pakistani prison after more than a decade. Now, the boy he was gone, and the man he could have been ceased to exist, he must figure out who he is...

— Mar 18 2014

The unnamed Pakistani narrator of Peter Hobbs's sad little novel, In the Orchard, the Swallows, has just been released from prison, arriving exhausted at the family pomegranate orchard he hasn't seen for 15 years. He stays in the house of kindly Abbas, an educated man who found...

— Feb 18 2014

Hobbs’ novel is narrated by a nameless man whose release from many years in a Pakistani prison gives him time to reflect on his wasted years. The cause of his imprisonment is revealed through writings in his journal to his long-lost love, the daughter of a wealthy local man.

— Feb 10 2014

Stories are built on characters, plots and ideas. But they are also built on sentences, rhythms and words. "In the Orchard, the Swallows," a stirring novella by Peter Hobbs, is a pristine example. His complete, nuanced command of language and all its beautiful waves and turns...

— Feb 9 2014