Well this is desperately depressing... and yet there's a seed of resilience in here, even if it expresses itself in self-destructive and often violent ways. Lela, who has aged out of care in the residential school that caters mostly (if not solely) to the intellectually handicapped, is a survivor. Self-contained, determined, she wants two things: to murder the school's history teacher, who rapes the little girls under his care, and to ensure that a little boy she is particularly fond of is adopted into a foreign home, on the grounds that life in America is certain to be an improvement on a rundown school in post-Soviet Georgia. She doesn't count on the fact that little Irakli doesn't want to be adopted, hoping as he does that the mother who abandoned him will one day return... Irakli, it seems, has short-term memory problems, and is continually certain that "next week" his mum will come, when really she's run off to Greece to improve her own life and get away from a child who may never really be more than that.

It is a grim portrait of an awful school where the children are exploited in any number of horrifying ways, but it's also a tautly constructed novel with extremely elegant prose. There's something very sparse about The Pear Field - the name coming from the swampy, stunted orchard by the school, with its consistently inedible fruit - both in words and in effect. It's compelling and terrible and is at once both very easy to read, and very difficult.