As soon as he is able he invests all he has in a remote but beautiful estate in Devon, determined to make something wonderful of the place and to be at the heart of what is most real and most important. So beautiful to read that I am prompted frequently to read passages out loud which I found to enhance my enjoyment.

He meets and marries a feisty beauty, Henrietta, running away from her avaricious merchant father and he decides to set up a business running freight via coaches between railway depots and cities not fed by the railway. Delderfield was a journalist, playwright and novelist, renowned for brilliantly portraying slices of English life.

It is a generalization to be sure, but today's literary novelists work with a much smaller scope than those of the past. He had even had a ring made for her similar to the ruby ring he had made for Adam to give to Henrietta.

Their breed of escapism is one of immersion and the big fat story telling literary novel is the same.He met and spoke with a railway captain and set about determining how to start an overland freight hauling business that would bring materials from the outlying areas to the railroads. What I really wanted was to be a novelist," he told one interviewer, "to project the English way of life in the tradition of Hardy and Galsworthy. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a ‘happily-ever-after Cinderella’ story but an uplifting one nonetheless, despite the many problems that could endanger both Adam’s and Henrietta’s happiness. Adam and Henrietta's marriage was perhaps one of the most interesting that I have ever encountered in fiction.

p>Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notice.Using his book as a measuring stick against the past, it’s remarkable how little England seems to have changed (especially for the better) in that half a century that I have now lived through.

i feel like i uncovered a gem in this book--i get the sense it was the 1970s equivalent of the da vinci code (without all the quasi spiritual nonsense of course).

These same men, and their four-horse equipages, had been the wonder of their time, a race apart, as dissolute and dependable as the toughest infantry at the peak of training, yet here they were lining up for haulage jobs in their late forties and early fifties, traditional truculence undispelled by their desperate need to earn a living the only way they knew. I had heard of Delderfield but that's all and I don not know why he is not better-known or read on both sides of the pond! Adam becomes a business-owner of a different sort, treating his employees and managers as full team members.