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

Pears is an exemplary historical novelist with a Romantic eye for nature, and this heady walk through the forgotten lanes of England thrums with life ... Pears takes his place alongside Flora Thompson and Ronald Blythe – even Hardy – as one who teaches us the real nature of country as it used to be

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

A novel loud with brilliantly captured voices and vividly drawn characters ... With hypnotic lyricism, Pears describes this bucolic Devon world and the people who inhabit it

Daily Mail

A gorgeously hypnotic paean to rural England ... Pears seems to owe a debt to Cormac McCarthy. The Wanderers is peppered with moments of awestruck wonder at the natural world … In both this book and its forerunner, the care that has been taken with historical research is obvious; but it is this deeper, subtler layer of reconstruction that sets these moving novels apart

Melissa Harrison, Guardian

His lyrical but unsentimental portrait of a long-lost rural world, and the characters who are shaped by it, is affecting

Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

Pears's sumptuous but scrupulous descriptions of the countryside are as evocative as Robert Macfarlane's nature writing and as delicious to savour. The final part of this moving, absorbing odyssey cannot arrive quickly enough

Metro