Tim Pears: Blenheim Orchard [2007]

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: over-worked, worried about the children, trying to steer their marriage on an even keel. But change comes knocking at the Pepins' 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 the same again Perceptive, thought-provoking, utterly compelling, Blenheim Orchard is both human drama at its most powerful and an acute portrait of the times we live in.