The Given World (ebook)

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 familys past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.Praise forThe Stubborn Light of Things[Harrison] reflects on the changing habitat around her with passionate understanding and gentle encouragement that we follow suit.The GuardianAmong 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 dont really deserve . . . [yet] an appealing feature of Harrisons book is how hopeful she remains.The Sunday TimesHarrison makes an ideal literary guide: unshowy, sensitive and knowledgeable.Best Nature Books of the Year,The TimesPraise forAll Among the BarleyAn 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, Harrisons novel is astonishing, as potent and irresistible as a magic spell . . . a kind of time travel.The GuardianHarrison 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 SpectatorExquisitely written, elegantly plotted.The New Statesman