The Given World - by Melissa Harrison (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

"Landscape, for most writers, is often a mere backdrop to something else--plot or character, for instance. But in The Given World, Melissa Harrison places landscape in the foreground, her main character being the village of Lower Eodham itself. This group portrait of some of its villagers offers a way of rethinking the relationship between fictional characters and the natural world."
--Jonathan Coe, 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

"At times resembles a cosy-enough episode of Miss Marple and at other times the brilliant warp-realism of Ali Smith . . . Harrison, who writes a monthly nature column for The Times, remains an appreciative inheritor of the bio-literacy intrinsic to the very rich tradition of English nature writing."
--Gregory Day, The Saturday Paper

"Harrison's evocation of a textured particularity in the life of the village is persuasive, and the sense of certainties 'now drawing to an end' gives her novel a sombre coherence."
--Dinah Birch, Times Literary Supplement

"Harrison has written a captivating book, literally spellbinding, as if ancient forces are reacting to the changes happening in the village in their own mysterious ways. And Harrison doesn't try to define them. Instead, she creates a deep, visceral sense of the very much living entity that Lower Eodham is."
--Timothy Niedermann, Ottawa Review of Books

"Cast[s] a jeweler's eye on the marvels of trees and fields, water and skies . . . As I comb the pages, Harrison's world will become my world, too."
--Danny Heitman, The Advocate

"In this beautifully written novel, Harrison explores the interplay between nature and humans and the clash between an old village's history and culture and modern life."
--Library Journal (starred review)

"While the valley and village are characters themselves, it's the people and their interactions with this world that make the story work. It shows how much of our lives are influenced by nature and the wider world around us."
--Katie Ingram, The Seaboard Review

"The world-building is patient, with layers added and new associations revealed on a continual basis. Details that seem innocuous, but that carry real weight, appear in each new chapter, leading to thrilling payoffs throughout. Close attention is also paid to the community's ecological landscape and folkways, with lush, cohesive depictions of plant and animal life appearing alongside information about the community's ancient rituals and hyper-modern ailments. The Given World is a moving novel about a changing community, narrated with deep focus on place and belonging."
--Foreword Reviews

"From the very first pages of The Given World by Melissa Harrison, we find ourselves deep amongst the greenery, where a great force of life is described with the accuracy of a naturalist and the lyricism of a poet."
--Kate Blincoe, The Ecologist

"The blunt speech and straying thoughts of working men are well conveyed . . . a melancholy and satisfying complement to its acclaimed predecessor [All Among the Barley]."
--Suzy Feay, The Spectator

"The Given World does feel like it's wrestling with the larger issues the planet is facing in the pondering what comes after this way of life is gone . . . and this stark detachment sits over and above the warmth of Harrison's writing (you can feel her love of this world, both the world of her story and the world in which we reside). There is real humanity here."
--Bookmunch

"Authenticity is a term that can feel worn from overuse, but it strikes me that Harrison's great gift, across all her work, is a genuine care for her subject matter and a desire to communicate something meaningful to her audience."
--Julia Bostock, The Observer

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

About the Author