The Short Day Dying [Paperback]

This is the story of four seasons in the life of Charles Wenmoth, a twenty-seven-year-old apprentice blacksmith and Methodist lay preacher in Cornwall in 1870. Life is at its hardest; poverty is everywhere. Charles crosses and recrosses the raw, beautiful landscape, attending to the sick and helping the poor, preaching in chapels with ever-dwindling congregations. He questions his faith along the way but never quite loses it, balancing it with the pleasure he takes in nature, the light in the skies, the colors of the earth, and in his attachment to a girl to whom he is drawn by the piety and patience she maintains despite her long illness.

Inspired by the language of his great-great-grandfather's diaries and the Bible, influenced by authors as diverse as Hardy, Blake, and Faulkner, Peter Hobbs has created a first novel of breathtaking ambition and stylistic innovation, and of enormous emotional power.

UK PRAISE FOR THE SHORT DAY DYING
How rare it is to come across a new novel as beautifully conceived and finished as this. We are enclosed completely in a world of faith and belief that has been made to feel utterly authentic . . . A wonderful book. -THE OBSERVER

A richly resonant novel . . . beautifully evocative.
-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Well if happiness were found in a round of duties I should have had my portion today for I have not had much leisure. I am gone down early to St Germans to change the tracts they have not been done since the turn of the year. I found the workers already labouring at the quay loading the barges as the tide rose. The railway viaduct stands immense over the scene it is a remarkable construction one which seems to diminish us in comparison yet still leaves us to wonder at what men can do.
 
                One or two of the men nodded to me as I passed by there are some here who know me. All l“m