A powerful novel about destiny, home and surviving in a world in flux Set in Britain in AD 72, Run to the Western Shore tells the story of a young Roman slave, Quintus, and Olwen, daughter of the chief of a local tribe. Quintus, long exiled from his people, has travelled great odysseys in the retinue of a powerful man, and although a citizen of nowhere, is a man of reason, fluent in many languages. Olwen, imperious tribal royalty, is rooted in her native land – a volatile warrior, fiercely attached to the natural world. Promised to a powerful Roman by her father as part of a peace treaty, Olwen flees during the night, taking Quintus with her. Hunted by an army, the two make their way across the country, living off the land, heading for the western shore… Written in spare but evocative language, Run to the Western Shore is a tale of quest and struggle, but also an ode to the land and a love story about the reconciliation of opposites in times of need.
Author
Born in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon and left school at sixteen. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled jobs: trainee welder, assistant librarian, trainee reporter, archaeological worker, fruit picker, nursing assistant in a psychiatric ward, groundsman in a hotel & caravan park, fencer, driver, sorter of mail, builder, painter & decorator, night porter, community video maker and art gallery manager in Devon, Wales, France, Norfolk and Oxford. Always he was writing, and in time making short films. He took the Directing course at the National Film and Television School, graduating in the same month that his first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was published, in 1993.
