The Given World: The Rural Uncanny

Hear award-winning nature writer and novelist Melissa Harrison discuss her novel The Given World, a ‘dark pastoral’ exploring the deep and fragile connection between humanity and the natural world. The inhabitants of an English country village are beset by an uneasy shift in the seasons, illuminating the natural, personal and national transitions of our time.

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.

‘A novel that reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives. I can’t think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty.’ Evie Wyld

‘A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I’ve read this year. Extraordinary.’ Francis Spufford

‘I loved the way The Given World is at once warm and clever, meticulously attentive to place, plants and animals while insisting on human grace. Melissa Harrison’s prose is strong and lovely as ever.’ Sarah Moss

Melissa Harrison is a novelist, nature writer, podcaster and children’s author. Her 2018 novel All Among the Barley was the UK winner of the European Prize for Literature. Her work has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She lives in Suffolk.