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 Given World
“One of the things Harrison does well is express the experiences of rural life, human and animal. Her depictions come to life . . . This is a book too artful and subtle to be finger-wagging, but it reminds us of what is happening, and the warning for the future of places like Lower Eodham was there in the title all along. The world was given to us, and it can also be taken away.”
—John Self, The Times
“This is concertedly a novel of, and for, an era of ecological crisis . . . Harrison has drunk deep in the culture of the rural eerie, and the novel feels for the uncanny effects of environmental change. For me the novel’s ecological seriousness has less to do with eeriness than with its spreading of narrative weight across many lives.”
—Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
“The Given World is beautifully and sensitively observed . . . Harrison’s novel offers us more than a glimpse of that other, deeper, older world; it is a luminous, moving exploration of all that we have—and all that we have to lose.”
—Financial Times
“The Given World is a quietly stunning book, attuned to the rhythms of nature and the ways we’ve broken them, and the nature of modern life and the ways it’s broken us.”
—Gregory Kornbluh, Downbound Books (Cincinnati, OH)
“In the rural English village at the heart of Melissa Harrison’s gorgeous new novel, The Given World, nature is ever-changing . . . Harrison masterfully blends modern sensibility with a profound awe of the natural world. This is a novel that begs the reader to slow down, to contemplate our relationship with the land and each other, to find community in our differences, to listen to nature—for it too has a story to tell. I was utterly charmed by this wonder of a book.”
—Hannah Debree, Orinda Books (Orinda, CA)
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
