"Pears's prose ballad." - Library Journal
"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. His unsentimental handling of rural poverty precludes any chocolate boxery, yet his evocation of the land's sounds, smells and tastes are a match for any of the great scribes of the countryside . . . Pears takes his place alongside Flora Thompson and Ronald Blythe—even Hardy—as one who teaches us the real nature of country life as it used to be. The Wanderers is not only a worthy successor to last year's superb The Horseman, but a very fine novel in its own right." - Saturday Review, The Times
"This elegiac second novel in Pears’s West Country Trilogy (after The Horseman) movingly depicts life in the English countryside on the eve of the First World War… this majestic, foreboding novel paints an emotional portrait of a land on the cusp of turmoil." - Publishers Weekly
"A gorgeously hypnotic paean to rural England . . . It is no mean feat for a writer to eschew the tyranny of cliffhangers, coincidences and plot twists, instead trusting the reader to stay with them for the sheer pleasure of the writing and the interest in the world conjured up. It requires unwavering confidence; a consistency of pace and vision that must be there from the outset, and must not falter; and something withheld, however subtly, that creates an itch to turn the page . . . 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." - Guardian
"In this powerful, episodic sequel to The Horseman (2017), Leo Sercombe starts his journey west in June 1912, at the point the first story ended… Thought provoking, homespun, and poignantly drawn from the earth (like Rae Meadows' I Will Send Rain, 2016), this second in a trilogy is an unforgettable treasure and will have readers eagerly anticipating the finale." - starred review, Booklist
"Tim Pears's complicated characters and lilting place-based language give [The Wanderers] an addictive freshness. He is also one of the rare writers who can capture the unassuming grace of a good draft horse and an all-encompassing rhythm of rural life." - Book Riot
"A classic . . . Leo and Lottie step out into the world, and twentieth century rushes up to greet them . . . knotty and nuanced." - Times Literary Supplement
"In Pears's sentences, long and rolling as the hills they describe, and in his characters' love for and familiarity with their settings, the English countryside and its fauna come to vivid life." - Observer
"His lyrical but unsentimental portrait of a long-lost rural world, and the characters who are shaped by it, is affecting." - The Sunday Times
"Hypnotic . . . Rural living is conjured up exquisitely, the reader sinking into the rhythms of the land. Pears describes a way of life that's infused with an unspoken nostalgia, as we know how much will change after the Great War, and he cleverly shows things drawing to a close without having to mention the conflict that looms large on the horizon." - BBC Countryfile
"The writing is both transcendental and sharply focused, reaches new heights, revealing the beauty and brutality that coexist in nature. Timeless, searching, charged with raw energy and gentle humor, The Wanderers is a delicately wrought tale of adolescence; of survival; of longing, loneliness and love." - Midwest Book Review
"A novel loud with brilliantly captured voices and vividly drawn characters . . . A lyrical journey worth undertaking." - Daily Mail
"Pears's painterly style . . . should keep the reader engrossed. He creates clear-eyed portraits of a lost way of life, and of a people whose traditions were disregarded throughout most of the 20th century . . . Country life used to be populated by these eccentric gypsies, pagans and mystics. The Wanderers invites them into our imaginations once again . . . Pears's book is a . . . triumph: a novel for those who—in the words of that old folk song—ain’t got no home in this world any more." - Glasgow Sunday Herald
"Pears's sumptuous but scrupulous descriptions of the countryside are as evocative as Robert Macfarlane's nature writing and as delicious to savour. The book ends before Leo's trajectory back to Lottie, his love from the first novel, has become clear—the final part of this moving, absorbing odyssey cannot arrive quickly enough." - Metro
"The Horseman, the first novel of a projected trilogy, is . . . a marvelously imagined re-construction of a lost world and vanished way of life . . . I look forward to reading these promised volumes, for this is a wonderful novel . . . Tim Pears combines a down-to-earth rendering of the realities of rural life with a magical sense of another world beyond our everyday experience." - The Wall Street Journal on THE HORSEMAN
"Pears steadily and satisfyingly branches out, unfurling his canvas and introducing characters we want to see more of . . . [A] beautiful and engaging novel. Bring on the second act." - Minneapolis Star Tribune on THE HORSEMAN
"Pears’s fiction has been likened to Thomas Hardy’s, and the comparison is apposite. As a coming-of-age novel, The Horseman is wise and insightful. As a love story, it is moving and sincere. And as a portrayal of rural Edwardian England, it is powerful, vivid and humane." - Observer on THE HORSEMAN
"The pleasure of it lies in taking in the language and the setting … and in reading it like a long poem, with each chapter a stanza ... I am ready for volume two." - Jane Smiley, Guardian on THE HORSEMAN
"So gripping that devouring volume two the second it appears is a foregone conclusion … As a testament to a forgotten generation of countrymen it is unsurpassed." - The Times on THE HORSEMAN
"A mesmerising book . . . An evocation of the pre-First World War countryside, sparely written and imagined with exceptional fidelity." - Clive Aslet on THE HORSEMAN, Country Life
01/01/2018
This second volume of Pears's "West Country Trilogy" picks up where The Horseman ends. Young Leo Sercombe has grown up among the workers on the estate of Lord Prideaux. Now exiled from that place and from Lord Prideaux's daughter, and in the period slipping into World War I, Leo takes up with a band of wanderers who "live in an ever on-rolling now." He travels through Devon, living off the land, learning, and above all, observing. He is introduced to the natural world and develops his talent for working with horses, including one exceptional horse that he races to victory on occasion. Meanwhile, there are brief scenes of Lottie Prideaux still on her father's estate, learning some of the same lessons as Leo. By the end of this volume the rumble of war is still being felt only at the edges, seemingly setting up the concluding volume. For those who have ever wondered just how far style can carry a novel, this can serve as Exhibit A. From Thomas Hardy through D.H. Lawrence to John Cowper Powys, the mystical relationship between man and an atavistic nature has served as a crucial component in their work and style. VERDICT Pears's prose ballad manages to make the story, if not new, at least as bracing and possibly as threatening as a Devon stream.—Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO
2018-02-20
A teenage boy scrapes a living roaming the southern counties of pre-World War I England as a girl he loves drifts toward maturity in surroundings of insulated privilege.Time passes with slow deliberation in this restless second volume of the West Country trilogy as Pears (The Horseman, 2017, etc.) maintains his commitment to the seasonal and laboring round of a bygone era. The novel picks up where Volume 1 closed, with Leo Sercombe cast out from his childhood home, beaten and bereft. Near starvation, he's rescued by a gypsy family whose adoption develops into a kind of enslavement as Leo works off his debt, initially with chores, later—when reunited with a stunning white colt and using his remarkable equestrian skills—by enhancing the betting in an important race. Meanwhile, Lottie, the 14-year-old daughter of Lord Prideaux, progresses toward adulthood, attending the Derby (an annual British horse race) and developing a passion for biology. Leo's peregrinations serve as a lens through which Pears presents a succession of impoverished vistas—ruined mines, mean farms—and a minutely observed landscape in which the boy scrounges work, learns some skills, makes a few friends, and is robbed of his magical horse. Weather, wildlife, and rural practices are delivered in detail, from how to butcher a deer to the best response when an owl lands on your wrist, talons first. Avoiding conventional plot developments, pulled along instead by the gravity of survival and impending history, the novel closes with a glimpse of 1915, of war and the irreversible social disruption seeping into this panorama split between Leo's poverty and Lottie's luxury.Episodic, instructive, occasionally resonant, this is slow, lambent fiction that pays unsentimental tribute to ways of being now disappeared from the land.
