To Be A Pilgrim (First Trilogy Book 2)

By Joyce Cary

Tom Wilcher is a miserly lawyer, deeply at odds with the modern world. Approaching death, amidst a close-knit family that he both resents and loves, he reviews his life and times.

Tom Wilcher, the hero of the second volume of Joyce Cary’s First Trilogy, has been at various times a political activist, a tight-fisted lawyer, a self-sacrificing brother and a dirty old man. But as he faces death his spiritual yearnings are uppermost in his mind.

Each volume of Cary’s trilogy, which begins with Herself Surprised and continues in The Horse’s Mouth, brings a single character to intense and memorable life and can be read entirely on its own. But when read together the three books, with their three strikingly different narrators, afford new and startling perspectives on each other. 

In the end, the trilogy offers a sweeping vision, at once funny and sad, sympathetic and satirical, of humanity in all its fallen and free glory. It is the work of a writer of dazzling insight and verbal resource, and among the landmarks of twentieth-century fiction.