The Short Day Dying

Description

Charles Wenmoth is a young blacksmith and Methodist lay-preacher in the furthest, wildest reaches of south-west England. It is 1870 and preachers such as Wenmoth devote the weekdays to work and the Sabbath to walking great distances across country to preach morning and evening to ever dwindling congregations. Wenmoth himself burns with faith, but it is a faith balanced by an instinctive agnosticism: a pleasure in nature and the reality of the world around him. His only distraction is a local blind girl, Harriet French, who he is drawn to by the faith she maintains despite her debilitating condition. Over the course of one long Sabbath, after preaching and travelling through the day, Wenmoth returns to his village and devastating news. Will he finally summon the courage and try to face the doubt that has threatened to consume him for years past? In a magical act of lyrical ventriloquism, Peter Hobbs' debut novel recreates a world on the brink of change and a character at the edge of crisis. Gloriously redemptive, powerful and compassionate, The Short Day Dying is a love story of great power and imaginative richness.

Peter Hobbs grew up in Cornwall and Yorkshire, and lives in London. The Short Day Dying is his first novel. A collection of stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train, will be published by Faber in 2006.

"'How rare it is to come across a new novel as beautifully conceived and finished as this... A wonderful book.' Kirsty Gunn, Observer '[Wenmoth] is a man of simple faith, whose observations both of the redemptive powers of nature and the cruel nature of rural poverty are beautifully written.' Ian Marchant, Guardian"