The Redeemed: The West Country Trilogy

By Tim Pears

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 2020

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

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526601049

Tim Pears

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 and his wife live in Oxford. They have two children. timpears.com

Reviews for The Redeemed

[adrianburke_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have really enjoyed this trilogy though I cannot agree with the newspaper reviewer who compared Tim Pears to Cormac McCarthy. This last novel works well in terms of the "will they or won't they" in Leo's and Lottie's relationship. I am not sure all the Scapa Flow part fitted properly and in the revealing note by Pears at the end we learn that was based on his grandfather. Is that why it made the cut? Whatever, I did feel all the research showed a bit - kind of, "I have found all this out by reading so it is going in". Having said that the novel retains integrity. It could have all become like 'Lady Chatterly's Lover' but it doesn't.