'The Given World' is a true literary gift. An exquisitely written novel about life in a rural English village.

The Given World

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 doctor realises, too late, that he has long underestimated his wife; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast and unsettling dream. And alone in a converted priory, overlooking watermeadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives news which will force her to reconsider her family's past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.

Melissa Harrison

Melissa Harrison is a novelist, nature writer, podcaster and children’s author. She contributes a monthly Nature Notebook column to The Times and writes for the FT Weekend, the Guardian and the New Statesman. Her novel, All Among the Barley, was the UK winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. It was a Waterstones Paperback of the Year and a Book of the Year in the Observer, the New Statesman and the Irish Times.

A collection of Melissa’s Times columns, The Stubborn Light of Things, was named as East Anglian Book of the Year. Her previous books have been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (At Hawthorn Time), and shortlisted and longlisted for the Wainwright Prize (Homecoming and Rain). She lives in Suffolk.

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