Rain - by Melissa Harrison (Paperback)

About the Book

Almost every day, as natural and inevitable as breathing, weather fronts form, clouds gather and rain falls, changing how the English countryside looks, smells and sounds and the way the living things in it behave. It alters the landscape itself, too, dissolving ancient rocks, deepening river channels and moving soil from place to place. Rain is co-author of our living countryside; it is also a part of our deep internal landscape. Complain as we may, it is as essential to our sense of identity as it is to our soil. With a national obsession, a frequent inconvenience and an agricultural necessity, rain is what makes this land so green and pleasant; it's also what swells rivers, floods farmland and drives people out of their homes. But because it sends most of us scurrying indoors, few people witness what actually happens out in the landscape on a wet afternoon. Novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison visited four parts of the English countryside in showery weather and, when others looked apprehensively at the sky and went indoors, put on waterproofs and headed out. In Rain, she blends these expeditions with reading, research, memory and a little conjecture in order to follow the course of four rain-showers as they pass over English soil.

Book Synopsis

An evocative meditation on the English landscape in wet weather by the acclaimed novelist and nature writer, Melissa Harrison.

Whenever rain falls, the English countryside changes. Fields, farms, hills and hedgerows appear altered, the wildlife behaves differently, and over time the terrain itself is transformed. In Rain, Melissa Harrison follows the course of four rain showers, in four seasons, across Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor. Blending these expeditions with reading, research and memory, she shows that rain is part and parcel of the English identity.

About the Author

Melissa Harrison writes a monthly Nature Notebook column in The Times. Her debut novel Clay (2013) won the Portsmouth First Fiction Award and was chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year. Her second, At Hawthorn Time, was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award. It was one of A. S. Byatt's Summer Reads in the Observer, and a Book of the Year for 2015 in the Telegraph. She lives in south London.