This is the 6th novel by Francis Brett Young I have read. I can't recommend his novels enough - especially (though not exclusively) to fellow Midlanders, although the fact that his novels have fallen out of print does pose a problem. The later ones particularly are not too hard to find, and a few were republished in paperback a few years ago and they can sometimes be picked up too.
Dr Bradley Remembers is one of the longer books, my copy a hefty 1938 hardback edition running to some 740 odd pages. This again is a gloriously old fashioned novel. Flowery language - which I don't mind at all -FBY never uses ten words where fifty will do just as well : ) proper human dramas and tension. Real people inhabit the pages of Francis Brett Young's novels, in this case real Black country folk of the late 18th and early 19th Century. In the company of the wonderful John Bradley the reader is taken from a humble village in Shropshire of the 1870's through medical training at North Bromwich (Birmingham) in the 1880's, and through 50 turbulent years in general practice in Sedgebury (Sedgley in the Black Country) from the late 1880's untill the 1930's. When John Bradley moves to Sedgebury in 1888 with his new young wife, the landscape is very different to the landscape that exists 50 years later. Industrialisation comes to Sedgebury during those years, and like Thomas Hardy - who I have likened him to before - FBY depicts brilliantly the effects of progress and modernisation on the ordinary people of the area. Overall though this is just a hugely readable and hard to put down book. ( )