The Redeemed (West Country Trilogy #3)

by Tim Pears

Overview

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

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 gender as she covertly studies to be a vet. But the steady rhythms of Lottie's practice, her comings and goings between her neighbors 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 of 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 installment 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635573824
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	07/23/2019
Series:	The West Country Trilogy , #3
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Tim Pears is the author of ten 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 Wanderers. Married with two children, he lives in Oxford.

Editorial Reviews

"The genius of these books lies in their dramatic, detailed descriptions of work and their quiet celebration of the creatures and human devices of the English countryside of a vanished era." - The Washington Post on the West Country Trilogy

“In this powerful, episodic sequel The Horseman (2017), Leo Sercombe starts his journey west in June 1912, at the point the first story ended . . . Thought provoking, homespun, and poignantly drawn from the earth (like Raw Meadows' I Will Send Rain, 2016), this second in a trilogy is an unforgettable treasure and will have readers eagerly anticipating the finale.” —Starred review, Booklist, on THE WANDERERS

“This elegaic second novel in Pears's West Country Trilogy (after The Horseman) movingly depicts life in the English countryside on the even of the First World War . . . this majestic, foreboding novel paints an emotional portrait of a land on the cusp of turmoil.” —Publishers Weekly, on THE WANDERERS

“A marvelously imagined reconstruction of a lost world and vanished way of life . . . Tim Pears combines a down-to-earth rendering of the realities of rural life with a magical sense of another world beyond our everyday experience.” —Wall Street Journal on THE HORSEMAN

“Pears steadily and satisfyingly branches out, unfurling his canvas and introducing characters we want to see more of, plus a raft of unresolved issues and emotions . . . [a] beautiful and engaging novel. Bring on the second act.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune, on THE HORSEMAN

“[A] lovingly detailed almanac of a tale . . . a gloriously devoted poem to England's past.” —Kirkus Reviews, on THE HORSEMAN

“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

“A gorgeously hypnotic paean to rural England ... Peppered with moments of awestruck wonder at the natural world” —Melissa Harrison, Guardian

“Loud with brilliantly captured voices and vividly drawn characters … A lyrical journey worth undertaking” —Daily Mail

“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

“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” —Jane Smiley, Guardian

From the Publisher

2019-04-28
Battle, its aftermath, and the dawning of a new era shape the third episode of Pears' (The Wanderers, 2018, etc.) epic tale of love—love for the land and between two long-separated souls.

The pace rarely quickens in this deliberate concluding volume of Pears' trilogy of early-20th-century life, set in England's West Country during the transition from old farming and landscape traditions, through war, into the mechanical age. Nevertheless, separate moments of intense drama mold the lives of both landowner's daughter Lottie Prideaux and carter's son Leo Sercombe, who was cast out by his family years earlier. Like Ulysses, Leo has journeyed through multiple landscapes and perils before returning to the estate. As the novel opens he's a boy seaman in World War I, aboard HMS Queen Mary and about to enter the Battle of Jutland, which will see the death of nearly the entire crew, more than a thousand men and boys. Leo survives to become a deep sea diver, spending the postwar years helping salvage the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow and earning the money to buy himself "a field. A horse. A home." Lottie, meanwhile, is pursuing an interest in animal care and will become one of the first women to train as a vet. The stage is long set for the reunion of this pair whose class-spanning commitment to each other was made in childhood, but not before Pears once again lays down intensely detailed descriptions of work—in the navy, in the salvage business, in stables, fields, and barns—across the years. "Time proceeds along its ever-onward spiral. We join it for a moment," he observes, and in due course Leo and Lottie will converge. This book is less a climax, more the return of the native.

Pears' achievement is in his fine evocation of an era that's largely been lost and in his attention to the natural world.

Kirkus Reviews

Narrator Jonathan Keeble’s mastery of Tim Pears’s quietly beautiful and evocative writing is one of the many pleasures in this final installment of his West Country Trilogy. Set in rural southwest England in the early 1900s, the audiobooks conjure the pace, sounds, and sights of a lost world. Following the intertwining lives of Leo, the carpenter’s son, and Lottie, the daughter of the local estate, this volume brings us to WWI and beyond in a story that is absorbing, undramatic, and deeply satisfying. Keeble’s warm, melodious narration could float on the air of a late summer afternoon in the Devon countryside. And he colors Pears’s detailed character studies with telling accents and personality, creating a world in which one wishes to forever remain. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MAY 2020 - AudioFile