The Redeemed: The West Country Trilogy - Softcover

Pears, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1526604396 ISBN 13: 9781526604392

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019

Synopsis

A love divided. A world torn in two. A return. A redemption.

A stirring, exquisitely rendered tale of homecoming; the final instalment in Tim Pears's epic West Country Trilogy

It is 1916. Lottie Prideaux rides the winding lanes of her childhood on her motorcycle, defying the expectations of her class and sex as she trains to be a vet. Meanwhile young Leo Sercombe finds himself a long way from home, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary in the middle of the ocean. Here life is raw, bloody and vivid, with death never more than a heartbeat away.

As Leo and Lottie wander in this strange and brave new world, and as war, loss, violence and betrayal conspire to tear asunder the ties that bind the past, present and future together, can even the most fated of returns - and redemptions - hope to come to pass?

About this title

Review:

Praise for the West Country Trilogy: 'A gorgeously hypnotic paean to rural England ... Peppered with moments of awestruck wonder at the natural world (Melissa Harrison Guardian)

This intelligent and moving evocation of life on a country estate just before the First World War is both down-to-earth and magical. There are faint echoes of Alain Fournier's masterpiece Le Grand Meaulnes, and there's no higher praise (Allan Massie Sunday Herald, Books of the Year)

Goodness, Tim Pears writes beautifully . the descriptions of rural life, executed with painterly exactness, are a constant delight. The prose really sings (Mail on Sunday)

Tim Pears deserves a place among the best rural writers . Pears is an exemplary historical novelist with a Romantic eye for nature, and this heady walk through the forgotten lanes of England thrums with life. His unsentimental handling of rural poverty precludes any chocolate boxery, yet his evocation of the land's sounds, smells and tastes are a match for any of the great scribes of the countryside (Melissa Katsoulis The Times)

His prose is luminous, drawing in the reader . Pears' fiction has been likened to Thomas Hardy's, and the comparison is apposite. As a coming-of-age novel, it is wise and insightful . And as a portrayal of rural Edwardian England, it is powerful, vivid and humane (Hannah Beckerman Observer)

A classic . Leo and Lottie step out into the world, and twentieth century rushes up to greet them . Knotty and nuanced (Times Literary Supplement)

Loud with brilliantly captured voices and vividly drawn characters . A lyrical journey worth undertaking (Daily Mail)

Clear-sighted storytellers in the tradition of Rosalind Belben and Flora Thompson (and H. E. Bates, when he was writing about poachers rather than Larkins) know that real life in the country is bursting with politics, mystery, sex and death, and all you need to do is describe it beautifully and carefully. Only a few authors are talented or brave enough to do that, and Pears, in his maturity, is one of them ... As a testament to a forgotten generation of countrymen it is unsurpassed and it goes very nicely indeed with a dark night, rain on the windowpane and a cosy armchair (Melissa Katsoulis The Times)

His lyrical but unsentimental portrait of a long-lost rural world, and the characters who are shaped by it, is affecting (Nick Rennison Sunday Times)

Pears's sumptuous but scrupulous descriptions of the countryside are as evocative as Robert Macfarlane's nature writing and as delicious to savour . The final part of this moving, absorbing odyssey cannot arrive quickly enough (Metro)

Book Description:

A love divided. A world torn in two. A return. A redemption.

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: 1526604396
• ISBN 13: 9781526604392
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400