With the publication in 2009 of The New Number One, Geoffrey Lewis’ popular trilogy of historical novels set on England’s canals came to an end. Or so we thought… The brief epilogue of that book suggested many changes over a thirty-year period, and now this new book tells us how those changes came about:
August 1957 – It seems as though the parting of the ways has come for Michael and Harriet Baker and their children as they leave friends and family to head for a new life in Australia, but back in England, those friends and family are carrying on with life as before. The canals are still working, the trade still running at least for a time; in Queensland, life on a big outback station is a new experience for the Baker clan. Cattle & Sheep & Boats effectively picks up the stories of Geoffrey Lewis’ most popular characters to date, allowing his many readers to catch up with the people they have come to know from the books of the trilogy, and see how life has developed for them. And at last, how despite living on opposite sides of the world, the Baker and Hanney families are finally united…
This book is laid out in a very unusual fashion – the stories of Michael and Harriet’s settling in to life Down Under and Stevie Hanney’s return to the canals are told in the form of the exchange of letters between Warwickshire and Queensland, finally leading us to the same epilogue that concluded The New Number One. It tells the tale of the final decline of carrying on England’s canals, and the growth of the waterway leisure industry to its boom years of the 1970s and 1980s. Above all, as always with a Geoffrey Lewis novel, it is the deeply human story of the people who populate it as we follow their joys and pain through their own words.
With the ‘trilogy’ now up to four books, will we see any more of Mikey and Harriet, Steve and Ellie, and their children and extended families? ‘Well, I am wondering how they might have got on cruising the canals of the 1980s…’ Watch this space!
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