The third instalment in Tim Pears’s West Country Trilogy, a 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 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.
‘Exemplary, a feat of perception and description that earns him a place among a pantheon that stretches from Thomas Hardy to Flora Thompson’ Guardian
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