The Redeemed

The Redeemed is the final volume of Tim Pears's West Country Trilogy, which follows the earlier novels The Horseman and The Wanderers. It is a chronicle of love, exile and belonging in a world on the edge of change. It is 1916 and the world is at war. Young Leo Sercombe is hauling coal aboard the battlecruiser HMS Queen Mary, far from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem remote from a ship of oiled steel, smoke, spray and sweat, where death is never more than a heartbeat away. Back in the West Country, Lottie Prideaux rides her motorcycle between neighbours and their animals, defying the expectations of her class and sex while she secretly trains to be a vet. The steady rhythm of her work is shattered by a violent betrayal and a devastating loss. In a world torn apart by war, the novel asks how the old ways of life can survive and how a future can be imagined amid such change. It also asks whether Leo, lost in this strange new world, can ever find his way home. It is a story of love, loss and destiny, and an elegy for a vanished way of life.