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.
