His conclusion feels like a bit of an afterthought, the moral that you find in the concluding, uplifting stanza of a bad poem. I first read this book in the seventies and reading it a second d time you can understand how well-written it is.

He can make you laugh out loud, and generates a momentum that has you turning the pages wanting it never to end. Paul and Claire Craddock have grown older in years - but not in spirit, but changes are taking place in the countryside.Ratcliffe took credit for an idea of his wife to use their wagons to begin charging for excursions of people to sights of interest during the summer months. The Swanns do have a comparatively cushy life, but we see how hard Adam works and his financial difficulties, so it is vastly different in feel than a book focusing on the aristocracy, for example. The beginning of the book took me much longer because it was more about the logisitics of his company than about the people in the book. And he is determined to win the beautiful, strong-minded Henrietta, and persuade her to share in his struggles and triumphs. A major dispute and turning point between Adam and Henrietta comes about because of the suffering of a chimney sweep.

This is the kind of book that becomes a favorite, at least for me, because I love huge complex stories like this. In his struggles to become a respectable and successful owner of a horse-carriage business, he has a few supporters, including his young wife, Henrietta and, surprisingly, his own father. It is a romantic tale, too, crammed with dramatic inci dents, ingenious inventions, co incidences and diverting im probabilities.

What helps set great historical fiction apart from the average is the little details of everyday life and, probably the most important aspect, credible dialogue. That said, I have had years of enjoyment out of the likes of the Chronicles of Barset or the Pickwick Papers. There are some great stories, even heroic stories amongst them, including escaped lions, shipwrecks, collapsed mines, and more. One may not believe every surprising episode in “God Is an Eng lishman,” but one learns to be lieve in Adam and Henrietta.

Done and done with a bit of skip-skimming as the author steadfastly refused to smartly wrap things up w/o more tedious hosannas hung onto the title notion. This bestselling novel set in the ruthless world of Victorian commerce follows the fortunes of Adam Swann, a scion of an Army family and veteran of campaigns in the Crimea and in India, in his quest to found his own financial dynasty. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking.There is a lot of detail about the logistics of this business, but somehow it was never boring, although I sometimes wished the book had included a map. H. has known kiddo since he was in elementary school, as he was the director of our favorite summer camp.

He also weaves in a witty, self-knowing, self-mocking account of his own faith journey, from the heavy-duty evangelical Christianity of his youth when he was stoned as he walked, strumming his guitar, through the Bogside district of Derry inviting people to prepare the way of the Lord, through a spell as a reporter at Church Times, the parish pump of Anglicanism, and on to his loss of belief during IVF treatment. Filled with epic scenes and memorable characters God is an Englishman triumphs in its portrayal of human strength and weakness, and in its revelations of the power of love. Adam starts a business hauling cargo around Britain, filling in gaps left by the railroad, employing the drivers who were left unemployed by that same invention. 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. I happen to know that this was a significant event in Charles Dickens’ life, so I liked the touch of reality that lent to the situation.His late 60’s dissection of English politics culture and economics during the last two or three centuries, from the height of the Empire to its decline and Britain’s nod toward Europe is highly critical of high-brow, stuck up England (the south), finds English yeomanry (the north) praise-worthy, though strangely passive and mimicking concerning the south and is spot on when he suggests its flirtation with Europe will ultimately be rejected. For, in Britain at least, alongside all the other privatisations of recent decades, there has been a privatisation of faith, with people exploring religion in their heads and hearts but increasingly rarely in houses of God. His wife had died giving birth to Henrietta and he valued her as a possession to be used to gain more wealth. We hear for example, about how some of Swann's operators won over locals with the capture of an escaped circus lion. If it could be summed up in 370 well-written pages, we would soon dismiss it and move on to looking for the next New Jerusalem.