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From the prize-winning author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves comes a beautiful, hypnotic pastoral novel reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, about an unexpected friendship between two children, set in Devon in 1911
1911. In a forgotten valley, on the Devon-Somerset border, the seasons unfold, marked only by the rituals of the farming calendar. Twelve-year-old Leopold Sercombe skips school to help his father, a carter. Skinny and pale, with eyes as dark as sloes, Leo dreams of a job on the Master's stud farm.
As ploughs furrow the hard January fields, the Master's daughter, young Miss Charlotte, shocks the estate's tenants by wielding a gun at the annual shoot. Spring comes, Leo watches swallows build their nests, hedgerows thrum with life and days lengthen into summer. Leo is breaking a colt for his father when a boy dressed in a Homburg, breeches and riding boots appears. Peering under the stranger's hat, he discovers Charlotte.And so a friendship begins, bound by a deep love of horses, but divided by rigid social boundaries – boundaries that become increasingly difficult to navigate as they approach adolescence…
Hallucinatory, beautiful and suffused with the magic of nature, this tale of an unlikely friendship and the loss of innocence builds with a hypnotic power. Evoking the realities of agricultural life with precise, poetic brushstrokes, Tim Pears has created a masterful, Hardyesque pastoral novel. The first in a dazzling new trilogy, The Horseman is his greatest achievement.
Published | 01 Oct 2017 |
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Format | Paperback |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 320 |
ISBN | 9781408876848 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Paperbacks |
Dimensions | 198 x 129 mm |
Series | The West Country Trilogy |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
This is it. This is the real thing. This is whatever I mean by the work of a born writer … The novel is comic, and wry, and elegiac, and shrewd and thoughtful all at once. Please read it'
A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph on In the Place of Fallen Leaves
Too subtle to be sentimental, too well written to be obvious. The author is a gifted storyteller, steeped in country lore and the beauty of ordinary events. Like Thomas Hardy whose kindred spirit quietly animates these pages, he is concerned with the dignity of work, the force of destiny and the consequences of human passion
New York Times Book Review
Highly atmospheric … It has an intoxicating, magical quality which completely beguiled me
Jeremy Paxman, Independent
The writing is so genuine. Nothing is posturing or romanticised … There's so much talent here
Barbara Trapido
An unusually well-made novel which, through being less English than one would expect, produces a very English kind of magic
Giles Foden, Independent on Sunday
Refreshing … even revelatory … A work that is dense with detail and richly evocative … A very impressive performance
Jane Smiley
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