About the Book
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 the Author :
Tim Pears is the winner of a Lannan Prize and the author of eleven novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award), In a Land of Plenty (made into a ten-part BBC series), Landed (shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012 and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2011, winner of the MJA Open Book Awards 2011) and, most recently, The Horseman (2017) and The Wanderers (2018), the first two books in The West Country Trilogy. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and Reading Round Lector, and has taught creative writing for Arvon, the University of Oxford, First Story and Ruskin College, among others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Oxford.
timpears.com
Review :
Exemplary, a feat of perception and description that earns him a place among a pantheon that stretches from Thomas Hardy to Flora Thompson
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
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
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
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
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
A majestic paean to a way of being in the natural world, the West Country Trilogy is a marvel
Triumphant … A masterpiece
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
Pears is a master storyteller
Goodness, Tim Pears writes beautifully … the descriptions of rural life, executed with painterly exactness, are a constant delight. The prose really sings
Tim Pears deserves a place among the best rural writers
A gorgeously hypnotic paean to rural England ... Peppered with moments of awestruck wonder at the natural world
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
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
A classic … Leo and Lottie step out into the world, and twentieth century rushes up to greet them … Knotty and nuanced
Loud with brilliantly captured voices and vividly drawn characters … A lyrical journey worth undertaking
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
His lyrical but unsentimental portrait of a long-lost rural world, and the characters who are shaped by it, is affecting
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
A triumph … creates clear-eyed portraits of a lost way of life, and of a people whose traditions were disregarded throughout most of the 20th century … Country life used to be populated by these eccentric gypsies, pagans and mystics. The Wanderers invites them into our imaginations once again
The pleasure of it lies in taking in the language and the setting – the West country, in 1911 and 1912 – and in reading it like a long poem, with each chapter a stanza
This book needs to be read with quiet attention to reap its rich rewards
An assured, slow-burn, lyrical book, a rewarding read in our troubled times
With hypnotic lyricism, Pears describes this bucolic Devon world and the people who inhabit it, all of them secure in the knowledge of their place in the grand scheme of things ... [A] paean to the pastoral
Neatlycrafted, and compelling
A mesmerising book … An evocation of the pre-First World War countryside, sparely written and imagined with exceptional fidelity … A tale beautifully told
Magically immediate
An exhilarating vision, a bittersweet elegy for the innocent certainties of an agrarian world before the industrialised horrors of the 20th century come crashing down
A distinctly compelling pastoral bildungsroman that leaves the reader eager for the next installment
Pears’s detail of the period’s cadences, refusal to rush things and undervalued knack for a satisfying narrative twist steer us from sentimental waters towards masterpiece territory
