The Horseman - Hardcover

3.89

1,230 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1632866935 ISBN 13: 9781632866936

From the prize-winning author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves comes a hypnotic pastoral novel about an unexpected friendship between two children, set in Devon in 1911

1911. In a forgotten valley on the Devon-Somerset border, the seasons unfold, marked only by the rituals of the farming calendar. Twelve-year old Leopold Sercombe skips school to help his father, a carter. Skinny and pale, Leo dreams of a job on the estate's stud farm. He is breaking a colt for his father when a boy dressed in a Homburg, breeches and riding boots appears. Peering under the stranger's hat, he discovers Miss Charlotte, the Master's daughter. And so begins a friendship between the children, bound by a deep love of horses, but divided by rigid social boundaries - boundaries that become increasingly difficult to navigate as they approach adolescence.

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Review:

This is it. This is the real thing. This is whatever I mean by the work of a born writer . The novel is comic, and wry, and elegiac, and shrewd and thoughtful all at once. Please read it' (A. S. Byatt Daily Telegraph on In the Place of Fallen Leaves)

Too subtle to be sentimental, too well written to be obvious. The author is a gifted storyteller, steeped in country lore and the beauty of ordinary events. Like Thomas Hardy whose kindred spirit quietly animates these pages, he is concerned with the dignity of work, the force of destiny and the consequences of human passion (New York Times Book Review)

Highly atmospheric . It has an intoxicating, magical quality which completely beguiled me (Jeremy Paxman Independent)

The writing is so genuine. Nothing is posturing or romanticised . There's so much talent here (Barbara Trapido)

An unusually well-made novel which, through being less English than one would expect, produces a very English kind of magic (Giles Foden Independent on Sunday)

Refreshing . even revelatory . A work that is dense with detail and richly evocative . A very impressive performance (Jane Smiley)

An engaging, well-written and original novel. Pears could write about the washing up and make it interesting (Philip Hensher Guardian)

It is most beautifully written, hypnotic as Proust, very funny and full of love that doesn't cloy (Jane Gardam)

Reminiscent of Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, the writing retains a very English scale, closely observed and lyrical . A triumph . Sensitive, heart-warming and hallucinatory (Financial Times)

Beautiful (Salman Rushdie)

A remarkable first novel, which renders domestic detail fascinating and makes it quite possible to believe in magic (Sunday Times)

It is tricky coming across a novel you want to praise to the skies. Cool dispassionate criticism is much safer. But Tim Pears' In the Place of Fallen Leaves is more perfect than any first novel deserves to be (Observer)

Book Description:

From the prize-winning author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves comes a beautiful, hypnotic pastoral novel reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, about an unexpected friendship between two children, set in Devon in 1911

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