The Horseman: The West Country Trilogy

(Paperback)

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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 Masters stud farm. As ploughs furrow the hard January fields, the Masters daughter, young Miss Charlotte, shocks the estates 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 strangers 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.

Reviews

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 Theres 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
An engaging, well-written and original novel. Pears could write about the washing up and make it interesting -- Philip Hensher * Guardian *
It is most beautifully written, hypnotic as Proust, very funny and full of love that doesnt cloy -- Jane Gardam
Reminiscent of Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, the writing retains a very English scale, closely observed and lyrical A triumph Sensitive, heart-warming and hallucinatory * Financial Times *
Beautiful -- Salman Rushdie
A remarkable first novel, which renders domestic detail fascinating and makes it quite possible to believe in magic * Sunday Times *
It is tricky coming across a novel you want to praise to the skies. Cool dispassionate criticism is much safer. But Tim Pears In the Place of Fallen Leaves is more perfect than any first novel deserves to be * Observer *

Author Bio

Tim Pears is the author of eight novels: In the Light of Morning, In the Place of Fallen Leaves (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award), Wake Up, Blenheim Orchard, In a Land of Plenty (made into a ten-part BBC series), A Revolution of the Sun, Landed (shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012 and the 2011 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, winner of the MJA Open Book Awards 2011), and Disputed Land. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and has taught creative writing at Ruskin College and elsewhere. He lives in Oxford with his wife and children. www.timpears.com