"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."—Wall Street Journal

From acclaimed author Tim Pears, the first novel in a sweeping historical trilogy, beginning in rural, pre-WWI England.

Somerset, 1911. The forces of war are building across Europe, but this pocket...

It is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary, is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battlecruiser-a universe of well-oiled steel, of smoke and spray and sweat, where death seems never more than a heartbeat away. Skimming through those West Country roads on her motorcycle, Lottie Prideaux defies the expectations...