The Redeemed: The West Country Trilogy - Hardcover

Pears, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1526601028 ISBN 13: 9781526601025

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019

Synopsis

The final instalment in Tim Pears's spellbinding chronicle of love, exile and belonging in a world on the brink of change

Selected as a book of 2019 by the Guardian, Scotsman and The Times

It is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary, is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battlecruiser, a universe of well-oiled steel, of smoke and spray and sweat, where death seems never more than a heartbeat away.

Skimming through those West Country roads on her motorcycle, Lottie Prideaux defies the expectations of her class and sex as she covertly studies to be a vet. But the steady rhythms of Lottie's practice, her comings and goings between her neighbours and their animals, will be blown apart by a violent act of betrayal, and a devastating loss.

In a world torn asunder by war, everything dances in flux: how can the old ways life survive, and how can the future be imagined, in the face of such unimaginable change? How can Leo, lost and wandering in the strange and brave new world, ever hope to find his way home?

The final instalment in Tim Pears's exquisite West Country Trilogy, The Redeemed is a timeless, stirring and exquisitely wrought story of love, loss and destiny fulfilled, and a bittersweet elegy to a lost world.

About this title

Review:

Exemplary, a feat of perception and description that earns him a place among a pantheon that stretches from Thomas Hardy to Flora Thompson (Guardian)

Woe betide anyone who interrupts the reader as this fine book reaches its conclusion. Pears gives us military history, veterinary science, sociology, theology, even old recipe for Christmas cake, and makes it sparkle like new. Moreover, he honours the kind of deep and tender love that can redeem even a soul ravaged by war, and concludes this wonderful series of novels on an important note of hope for mankind (Melissa Katsoulis The Times)

The steadfast rhythms of his prose are an integral part of his Hardy-esque design, which is to honour ideas of continuity, the elemental relationship between man and beast and even the very soil itself. It's so deeply, pleasurably wholesome it should be prescribed on the NHS (Claire Allfree Daily Mail)

With The Redeemed, Tim Pears brings his remarkable and riveting West Country trilogy to a satisfying end ... Admirably bold, vivid and persuasive . Pears writes with such imagination, authority and mastery of detail . There is rare ambition and daring to these novels (Allan Massie Oldie Novel of the Month)

Though Pears writes with elegiac tenderness about a rural way of life that has come under threat, he never lapses into sentimentality. The narrative, from first to last, has an exemplary clarity (Mail on Sunday)

Pears gives us military history, veterinary science, sociology, theology, even an old recipe for Christmas cake, and makes it all sparkle like new. Moreover, he honours the kind of deep and tender love that can redeem even a soul ravaged by war, and concludes this wonderful series of novels on an important note of hope for mankind (The Times)

A majestic paean to a way of being in the natural world, the West Country Trilogy is a marvel (Herald)

Triumphant . A masterpiece (Allan Massie The Scotsman)

The writing is beautiful. But, what was more unusual for me was to be carried so by an extended story . It's a long while since I've I felt such a manner of connection with the people of a narrative (Cynan Jones)

Pears is a master storyteller (Scotsman)

Book Description:

The final instalment in Tim Pears's spellbinding chronicle of love, exile and belonging in a world on the brink of change

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1526601028
• ISBN 13: 9781526601025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400