Mr Stephenson's Regret

This incident-packed novel brings to dramatic life the pioneers of the railway age. Significant figures appear on the big canvas of history - Wellington, Peel, Dickens and Queen Victoria among them - but the story belongs as much to the modest mining community that is home to George and Robert Stephenson in the early years, and to their intimates, not least the women in their lives (who have remained all but anonymous in the biographies). Central to the narrative is the complex, often tense...