The Redeemed
The West Country Trilogy
The final instalment 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 battle cruiser, 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?
Picture Credit: Bloomsbury
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.
- The final instalment in Tim Pears’s breathtaking West Country trilogy (TCM 15,000, and over 30,000 copies in all territories): ‘a gorgeously hypnotic paean to rural England’ – Melissa Harrison, Guardian
- Adored by critics and readers alike, the West Country Trilogy has been compared to the works of Robert Macfarlane, Cormac McCarthy, Laurie Lee, LP Hartley, Thomas Hardy, Flora Thompson, Cynan Jones and Ben Myers
Reviews
“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
“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
Author Biography:
Tim Pears is the winner of a Lannan Prize and 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 Horseman (2017) and The Wanderers (2018), first two books in The West Country
Trilogy. In America he has received a Lannan Award. 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.