You pick up a Tim Pears novel confident you are in the hands of a consummate storyteller, not someone who wants to play literary tricks. His writing is controlled but passionate, and he takes you to the heart of whatever issue is at the forefront of his mind.

In The Light of Morning is his seventh novel, but the one he has “always been going to write”. It was inspired by the life of his father Bill (pictured left), who in 1944 was smuggled into German-occupied Yugoslavia to link up with communist resistance fighters.

Tim said: “It was the formative experience of his life, so I knew I would write about it sooner or later. He became a communist in the war and then was disillusioned by what happened.

“He was a middle-class young man, a student from Oxford, who found himself catapulted into a completely alien environment. He worked very closely with the communists and became a fellow traveller.

“He had his eyes opened by his experiences in this crucible of war, but then realised that it was not just about what was happening in Yugoslavia, but about bigger games being played by the Great Powers.

“He came back to this country and then eventually found a union between his aspiration for social justice and communism and his spiritual side by becoming a priest.”

His father’s stories about his wartime exploits were part of the landscape of Tim’s childhood. Like any writer, Tim had buried them away for later use, but the idea took on a more urgent note after his father died only a few years after retirement.

“He was a writer manqué. He would have loved to have been a writer, and he was one of the reasons I became a writer. As a young man he had stories published in long-gone magazines like The Strand.”

Having developed cancer only two years after retirement, Tim’s father had only left “a memoir scribbled by a dying man”. So Tim felt duty-bound to write the story himself. But the tale forming in his mind was entirely fictional, set in wartime Yugoslavia — in the mountains of what is now Slovenia, rather than on the Dalmatian coast where his father landed.

It seems a departure from his most recent novels, Landed and Disputed Land, both set in Britain, mainly in rural Wales, where his grandparents lived.

But his latest book shows the same eye for country life and nature, with the English soldiers reminded of their homeland — Chilterns walks with the dog, or the meadows of Devon. And like Tim’s other novels, In the Light of Morning focuses on how individuals and their relationships are affected by world events.

Brought up in Devon, where his father had a rural parish on the edge of Exmoor, he left school at 16 and had a succession of temporary jobs, writing poetry in his spare time.

He moved to Oxford in the late 1970s at 22 and became a college night porter, but dreamed of becoming a writer or filmmaker. He eventually graduated from London’s National Film and Television School in 1993, at the age of 37, but realised his storytelling was better done on paper.

Having struggled on the breadline for years, he was able to earn a living as a full-time writer after the success of his first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves and is now happily settled in Cutteslowe with his Polish wife and children.

Perhaps because he missed out on the British higher education treadmill, he is not afraid to ask unfashionable questions about the ‘state of the nation’ and is as happy tackling the meaning of life as he is dealing with the psychology of family life, or indeed pacifism or contemporary politics.

In the Place of Fallen Leaves, published soon after he graduated, garnered great reviews and literary prizes, but his breakthrough was In a Land of Plenty, made into a BBC2 television serial. It follows a middle-class Middle England family over three generations, from rationing to Thatcher, in a town which he says is an amalgam of Rugby and Oxford: “Oxford without the university.”

Blenheim Orchard was set in north Oxford, where he still lives, and featured a disguised version of the campaign to save the Trap Grounds, then at risk of housing development.

Recently he has returned to more rural settings — the Oxford family in Disputed Land undergoes an argumentative car journey to spend Christmas with grandparents in the Welsh borders, where the depth of the adults’ country roots is revealed.

In the Light of Morning is also rooted in the land, and the main character is plummeted from the comfort of pre-war Oxford into a wilderness area beset by internecine conflict. The author is a great walker, and as well as immersing himself in every first-hand account he could find of the Balkans fighting, he trekked in the Slovenian mountains where his book is set. The book is alive with his enjoyment of landscape.

He said: “I always do a lot of research, but nothing like this before. It was so interesting, I realised that I could have been an academic. I can understand how academics can disappear into the Bodleian for days on end. The intricacies and loyalties were very involving. The struggle against occupation was happening at the same time as a civil war between various groups. The communists were trying to lead their country out of feudalism.

“I think British soldiers who were there treated it in one of two ways. They either regarded the Yugoslavs as brigands and bandits or they threw themselves into the relationships — like my dad. As the war drew to its conclusion, so the powers were thinking about the borders, and started playing games of chess. My dad started realising that they were simply pawns in a cynical game.”

“In my book the British officer is working with a band of partisans, moving from place to place, doing damage to German installations. Through the relationships he has with this band, this callow youth has his mind really opened.”

When he delved into the surviving memoirs, he was struck by how young the participants were. As with his other books, you turn the final page with a feeling of hope, despite all that his characters have endured.

“The war was the forging experience of a person’s life. They always looked back to that moment in their lives — all that they had to go through.”

Having finished his Second World War book, he started writing a novel set before and after the Battle of Jutland, where his grandfather fought. But now he has put that aside for something his wife said sounded “more fun” — a 1970s story “about a boy whose older brother died, who was a golden boy. The surviving brother is coming to terms with the fact that he survived.”

Another ‘fun’ project nearer to home is his work with photographer Rory Carnegie creating a portrait of the people who live near the site of the notorious Cutteslowe Wall, erected by a private housing developer in 1934 to separate new homes from council houses on the other side. It was demolished in 1959 after a long campaign. Mr Pears said: “The road still has different names, Wolsey Road and Carlton Road. Rory will photograph people and I am interviewing them. We’re not sure yet if it will be an exhibition or a book. It’s a fascinating story. A lot of the council houses are now privately owned and we hope it will help to break down barriers.”

* In The Light of Morning is published on February 13 (Heinemann, £17.99). Tim Pears will be discussing war and its aftermath with Tobias Hill, whose new book, What Was Promised, is set in post-war London, at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 25. www.oxfordliteraryfestival.org