Description

‘Wonderful … an Under Milk Wood for the twenty-first century’ AMY LIPTROT
‘Reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives’ EVIE WYLD
‘Extraordinary …The best serious fiction I’ve read this year’ FRANCIS SPUFFORD
‘Attuned, loving and thoughtful … I loved its warmth and intricacy’ SARAH MOSS
‘Nobody does nature better than Melissa Harrison’ TRISTAN GOOLEY

A FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2026

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.

Publisher Review

Melissa Harrison doesn’t just write the English countryside, she decocts, extracts, distills and blends its essences into fiction so real-world adjacent it haunts. The Given World is a masterful portrait of our time and place, which like the unquestionably animate river running through it, will not be contained. — Amy-Jane Beer The Given World is a superb and timely novel, lit and linked by people, place and time. It sings with symbolism and beautifully reflects the frightening and uncanny transitions of our time – natural, personal, national, historical – through the microcosm of a village and landscape that comes to life spectacularly through Harrison’s brilliant mastery of description and detail. Spirited, spirit-filled, strange, resonant, heartbreaking and poignant, The Given World rings through the reader like a struck bell. — Rob Cowen The Given World is a dark pastoral, deliciously laced with a hint of the supernatural. Through her nuanced characters, Melissa Harrison draws our attention to shifting political currents and contrasting ideologies. I’m full of gratitude for her gifts – she is a deeply sensitive and empathetic writer, even-handed about both rural and urban lives. That’s not something to be taken for granted in these polarising times. — Jini Reddy Precious few writers can set a story in nature convincingly and nobody does it better than Melissa Harrison. A tale of honest rural intensity that grips and surprises. — Tristan Gooley