Description
April brings spring surging with it, giving rise, among many in the village, to a comforting illusion that all is somehow still right with the world, and that nothing will ever change.
In the ancient Welm Valley, something is shifting: the river is behaving oddly, while the arrival of spring, with its familiar rhythms, is shadowed by an undercurrent of unease.
A woman falls while out walking and hopes to be found before nightfall; a builder experiences sudden, overwhelming vertigo on a farmhouse roof; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast, strange dream. And alone in the converted priory, overlooking watermeadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives devastating news which will force her to reconsider her family’s past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.
Praise for The Stubborn Light of Things
“[Harrison] reflects on the changing habitat around her with passionate understanding and gentle encouragement that we follow suit.”
—The Guardian
“Among our most celebrated nature writers in fiction and nonfiction . . . She is scandalised by the way that local authorities and developers tend to regard nature as a treat that ordinary people don’t really deserve . . . [yet] an appealing feature of Harrison’s book is how hopeful she remains.”
—The Sunday Times
“Harrison makes an ideal literary guide: unshowy, sensitive and knowledgeable.”
—Best Nature Books of the Year, The Times
Praise for All Among the Barley
“An in-the-bone connection with the natural world that contrives to be both sparklingly precise and wildly exhilarating . . . as an evocation of place and a lost way of life, Harrison’s novel is astonishing, as potent and irresistible as a magic spell . . . a kind of time travel.”
—The Guardian
“Harrison is adept at making several realities exist uncannily alongside one another. She conjures up nature, with its timeless rhythms and beauty, and invades it with the political . . . accomplished.”
—The Spectator
“Exquisitely written, elegantly plotted.”
—The New Statesman
