The Horseman, the first book in Tim Pears’s West Country trilogy, observed the budding relationship between a landowner’s daughter, Lottie, and a labourer’s son, Leo. In this second instalment, set in 1912-1915, the pair are apart. Lottie, on her country estate, mourns the loss of her mother and Leo, homeless, wanders across the countryside in the company of Gypsies, tramps and hermits. Descriptions of the landscapes are tinged with a sense of yearning and loss; hills remind Leo of his “mother’s bread-making. The earth […] kneaded into shape” and Lottie finds a flower “like an angel, its hood curved like a pair of wings”. This is a novel of longing and loneliness, yet it is also a novel of nature and of man’s connection to it – the “arcane language” that connects a boy to his horse, sustenance found in the leaves and fruit of hedgerows and in the milk and meat of animals. In Pears’s sentences, long and rolling as the hills they describe, and in his characters’ love for and familiarity with their settings, the English countryside and its fauna come to vivid life.

• The Wanderers by Tim Pears is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99