I found All Among the Barley a really fascinating look at a particular time and place in our history, rural England in the 1930s, while having some worrying parallels with our own time period.

Honestly, a lot of the farming terms and the descriptions of the farming practices went totally over my head. They tend to be presented and described without actually being defined, as though the narrator is talking to someone who knows what she's talking about. This didn't matter though, as the whole thing is told with a beautiful lyricism that made it absolutely entrancing. Listening to the family coming together to construct a rick was quite beautiful even without the first clue what a rick is or looks like, and I don't think a glossary of terms would have added anything, while slowing the story down.

Connie is a very interesting character. She brings such a romanticised vision of the countryside, seeing it all as quite a jolly lark helping out in the fields and talking about the importance of maintaining the old customs, when actually most of the farming folk she meets are quite interested in progress. The only reason for using horses to pull the machines rather than the new tractor is that they're more effective on the hard ground, not because it is some idealised vision of a traditional working farm. In some ways, Connie's vision of the countryside matches that of the reader, seeing this microcosm of the past captured between the pages of the book. Connie's true agenda unfolds slowly and in such a clever way that it is quite easy to agree with many of her positions and views, showing the seductive nature of her arguments and how so many people were swayed by people like her.

There are hints dropped throughout about something happening to Edie, lots of "the last time I will..." types of references. When it does, it is shocking and heartbreaking, and done so very well. It made for a very moving ending to the story, especially with the author's notes included afterwards.

A fascinating, beautiful and moving book!

Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley is a searing look at the rise of fascism and bigotry in the mid-war period; sharply and artfully written, it brings to mind a working-class version of Kazuo Ishiguro's astounding Remains of the Day, in how it examines the innocuous creeping-in of far-right ideas and how a broken, ravaged country created a perfect environment for them to begin to thrive.
I think, as a country, we Brits like to think that we always labeled Nazism as an evil force right from the start. We do that a lot, you know, pretending that we're the good guys. But in this novel, Melissa Harrison instead confronts the reality of the situation: that, in the years leading up to World War 2, a majority of the UK population thought that Hitler might be on to something.
It is a horrifying thought, one made all the more awful when you switch on the news or social media and realise that people are making the same mistakes that their great-grandparents did. Sure, it may be in another guise, parcelled up in a different sort of package and targeting a different group of people, but bigotry is bigotry no matter which way you slice it.
I think that is what makes Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley all the more compelling: the cyclical nature of history; the lessons that need to be learnt when we look back through the generations; the looming dread of long-informed foresight. It is a heady thing, one that works only to exemplify the wrought emotions in the novel; creating a connection through the generations between two times, and two people, that might at first seem inconceivably disparate.
After-all, by choosing not to romanticise the mid-war period (as so many other authors are wont to do), darkness inevitably rolls over the golden ears of corn; bringing those rose-tinted images tumbling back down to their grim reality. Its darker themes at the forefront, Melissa Harrison truly excels; bringing unmistakable humanity and life back to a time thought long since passed.

All Among the Barley is definitely a book to lose yourself in and admire the quality of the writing and characterisation rather than expect a swiftly moving story line.   It’s also, I think, a book that is worthy of some reflection as there are ideas and issues explored that are not immediately discernible but subtly introduced by the author.  Like the onion that farmhand John enjoys between two pieces of bread during a break from the harvest, it has layers to be peeled away.

In Edie, Melissa Harrison captures all the uncertainty of early adolescence.  Edie has a sense that she wants more from her life than her mother and her siblings, but she doesn’t know quite what.  She also feels a strong loyalty and connection to the family farm. ‘Despite its privations I was happy to grow up there because I loved our land fiercely, every single inch of it – and because I knew nothing else.’  She even begins to believe that, in some strange way, the success of the harvest and the future of the farm is down to her. 

When she meets the worldly and singular Connie FitzAllen, Edie initially falls prey to a kind of hero worship, seeing in Connie the possibility of a different kind of life, one less constrained by society’s conventions.  Ironically, Connie has a sentimental and bucolic view of the countryside, favouring the preservation of rural traditions over modernising initiatives that would relieve farming families like the Mathers of the repetitive, manual work that is their daily life. Like the reader, it will be only latterly that Edie learns Connie is not entirely what she seems and that her bright and breezy exterior hides some unpalatable attitudes.

After the measured pace of the rest of the book, I’ll confess I wasn’t completely sold on the rapid wrap-up contained within the epilogue.   However, I was definitely a fan of the wonderfully lyrical and closely observed descriptions of landscape and nature.  

‘At dawn, the dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures  so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water.’
‘It was full of the wheezing demands of newly fledged birds, the sky above us a hard blue vault where larks invisibly sang.’
‘The elders were in bloom, holding the creamy plates of their flowers up to the sky; somewhere deep in their green foliage wood-pigeons clattered and fought.’

All Among the Barley is one of the books in The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction’s ‘Academy Recommends’ list for 2019.  I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing, and NetGalley.

‘All Among the Barley’ by Melissa Harrison is set in a small world, the world of Wych Farm and the village of Elmbourne, in the inter-war years. The story is introduced by Edith June Mather, now an old lady, and transitions into the story of one summer when she was a teenager. Hanging over the first few pages is an unspoken warning that events so long in the past can be forgotten or recalled in error and that Edith may not be a reliable storyteller.
But ‘All Among the Barley’ is more than a coming-of-age tale; it is a story of society adapting to change, a story which resonates today. It is 1933 in East Anglia and Edie Mather is thirteen years old, a clever well-read child who longs to fit in. She lives on the family farm where hardship is an everyday fact. Edie, balancing between childhood and womanhood, is unsure of what she should do with her life, unaware she has choices and at times overwhelmed by her seeming lack of power. Superstitions become real to her. This is a book combining the pragmatic facts of daily farm life, the looming presence of anti-semitism and fascism, with teenage volatility, fantasy and a little witchery. Into this tight-knit rural world walks city reporter Connie FitzAllen who is writing about the loss of the old rural ways. Connie becomes a catalyst for change for the whole community, not just Edie, and in ways not at first obvious. Despite initial distrust of strangers, the locals and Edie’s family become used to Connie’s presence and she becomes a stand-in older sister for Edie, dispensing advice and pushing behavioural boundaries.
Writing about nature with as light a hand as the flight of the birds she describes, Harrison combines agricultural change, rural poverty, the rise of anti-semitism, and the changing role of women. The role models available to Edie are her mother, who worked the land in place of men during the Great War but reverted to being a housewife afterwards; her sister Mary, married young and with a baby she is not sure she loves; and Connie, who tells Edie there is life outside Elmbourne. Harvest time approaches and decisions must be made; Edie’s father must sell his crop at the right time to get the best price while Edie, uncertain whose advice to listen to, receives a job offer based in the nearby town. In the heat of summer, reality merges with imagination and Edie loses the ability to judge what is real.
A beautiful and tragic novel flawed only by its slow descriptive pace and a rather sudden ending. I was left with the feeling that perhaps the author tackled too many issues for such a calm, contemplative novel.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/

3.5 stars
Essentially this is a coming of age story set very firmly in the 1930's rural Suffolk landscape.    The language is poetic and highly descriptive with many archaic farming terms littering the pages.   Edie the protagonist is a confused 14-year-old girl, probably more confused than most but only just. She is clever and bookish and prone to flights of imagination. She is the youngest daughter to tenant farmers living in a ramshackle old thatched farmhouse.  They grow a mixture of barley and wheat and one bad harvest would bankrupt them.

Constance Fitzallen (Connie) a modern urbanite comes into their lives.  She is visiting the village and its surrounding farms writing a book about the country ways and wearing trousers no less (shocking at the time I guess).
Of course, Edie is fascinated and becomes almost infatuated with the older woman although others (like Edie's mother for instance) aren't instantly charmed.    As we progress through the summer we learn that Connie's ideology is not as innocent as it seems with a hefty dose of antisemitism thrown in.

Edie also seems to be struggling with her sexuality, and due to the era and her older sister being consumed with her new baby, there is nobody for her to confide in.  She is "walking out" with the boy next door but doesn't enjoy his advances but fantasises about Connie.

Edie also has fantasies that she is a witch and is constantly tracing witch marks (examples of which are given in the book) on herself and in the air (seems a little OCD at times).  I think we all have crazy fantasies when we are kids but in Edie's case, she seems isolated by her family who has far too many other things to worry about.

This is a quiet and slow story, and because of this, I didn't get into this the first time around.  In a way, I feel you have to be in the mood to move to another era when laundry took a full day and pretty much everything had to be done by hand.  It points towards the dangers of nostalgia and idealising a life that in reality was backbreaking.

Review due to be published on my blog on 14th Feb 2019

I'd better start by saying straight off that I seem to be one of the few people who didn't fall head over heals in love with this book. I loved Melissa Harrison's previous novel - At Hawthorn Time - partly I suspect because it represented the countryside in a 'warts and all' way. It wasn't shown as a pastoral idyll but as a place of work, with many ugly sides to it - from road kill to the destruction of landscape.
With All Among the Barley it feels like Harrison has swung the other way - to a view of the Suffolk countryside seen through rose-tinted glasses, and it just didn't grab me. Teenage narrator Edith certainly sees it this way, waxing lyrical over fruit laden hedges, with descriptions of nature and landscape just too overdone and fulsome. For a fourteen year old (my mother, born roughly the same time, commuted from her village into town to work in a factory at 14) Edith seems remarkable naive - of the grimmer aspects of farming, her father's associated drinking and rages, and the world outside the narrow confines of her village. Gradually though I began to see Edith as unreliable, neither as clever as she purports to be nor possessed of the special powers she claims. So should the reader see her pastoral idyll as equally fake? Is most of her tale just a hankering for a world that never existed? On the other hand, every review I've read seems to have taken Edith at face value, so I appear to be the odd one out here.

I grew up in Suffolk, and many of the places and traditions in this book are familiar to me from the stories told by my step-grandfather (who was also sent to Egypt during WWII, like a rather unsympathetic character in this book) I know my mother would relate to the protagonist's older sister, who has moved off the farm and traded her shared bedroom for a newly built flat full of pre-war mod cons. I was just as taken by Connie, the 'townie' who comes to Suffolk to learn about local traditions, as Ed was. It took me almost as long as Ed to work out exactly why she spoke so derisively of 'foreign investors' and 'fencing masters'; I almost fell hook, line and sinker for her racist rhetoric, much like Ed's father and, to a lesser extent, her mother. John, the sole voice of reason in Ed's household (and perhaps her entire community) has returned, near-silent, from the Great War. His horrific experiences could have persuaded him to take up Connie's cause, but instead he maintains a respect for all men, despite their religion or country of origin. He is naturally unselfish, taking pains to care for the farm's horses and any lost or injured animals Ed finds on her adventures. All the farmers are united in their desire for progress, something that shocks Connie, and sometimes seems at odds with Ed's grandparents' simple lifestyle and John and Ed's preternatural closeness to the elements. They understand that the land that sustains them must be battled into submission if they are to survive; only those who are removed from the day-to-day hardship of farm life have the time to mourn the loss of a quaint rural fashion. Ed is confused, then affirmed, by mystical visions, and the reader is left to ponder her role in the events that befall her family until the final chapter. I would recommend this book to anyone who is nostalgic for rural England- this book might bring them back to earth!

A superbly written evocation of how past and present can collide, and the internal conflicts coming of age can bring. Edie may be growing up in a pastoral setting, but there is a darker edge to rural life in the 1930s. She has much to contend with: her instincts rail against the patriarchal constructs which surround her, and her innate awareness of folklore is increasingly raising eyebrows.

To blandly describe Melissa Harrison as a ‘nature writer’ is to do her a disservice. She is a true chronicler of the human condition and its interplay with the natural world. Her writing is prescient and absorbing- an author not to be missed.

I love Melissa Harrison's writing of people-in-their-landscape, and of her books I've read so far, this felt to me the most complete.

It's 1933. Everything is threatening to change for bookish farmgirl Edie. She's 13, her sister's married, and farms across the county are struggling. Into her very small world comes Constance, studying the traditional way of life, arguing politics with the menfolk, writing articles and 'helping out'.

As always, Harrison's writing takes us beautifully and deeply into the rural life and landscape, this time of the 1930s. Rather than romanticising, however, the underlying themes portray a darker side, which feels horribly current today.

All Among the Barley is a gorgeously written new historical fiction novel set in 1930s rural England. It’s a slow burn of a book with some deeply relevant messages for us today.

With gorgeous writing and a strong sense of place it’s a really lovely to read. And so well written you almost don’t care what it’s about!

What I eventually realised is that All Among the Barley is, in fact, two stories in parallel – the main story that 14-year-old bookworm Edie records in first person of her life on the land; and the story that Constance – an outsider – is writing about what she perceives life on the land to be about.

In the same way their stories are sometimes hard to identify, the story in this book takes a long time to find. Though the beautiful writing makes it a very pleasant wait.

When it comes to evoking the natural world and capturing the sense of a superstitious, rural , community on the verge of disappearing after the First World War, Melissa Harrison is a very fine writer. For the first half of All Among The Barley it was like watching paint slowly drying, albeit a very beautiful paint from Farrow and Ball; and that's not to say it's a bad thing, just that there is often little sense of plot and (apart from the main protagonist) some of the characters have been picked straight from central casting. There are shades of Hardy here, even down to burning ricks and a rape scene reminiscent of poor Tessa Durbeyfield as well as a very Hardyesque sense of dark brooding and foreboding. And yet... half way through everything gains pace and the hints of forces at work are substantiated and brought out into the open: one character really is the violent drunk we'd suspected and another an out and out fascist. Topical questions are raised about how communities deal with those who are different and how easy it is to be influenced by the politically astute.

Ultimately though, this is an enjoyable story of the loss of innocence in a vanishing world brought to life by a writer with painterly gifts.

<I><blockquote>’Well, I’m no anti-Semite, of course, but they’re not from here, and if we’re not careful they’ll mar the character of England forever – not to mention the way they undercut wages and take work away from ordinary people, just as the Irish did... We must rebuild the country, and we must put our own kind first!... There are hordes of them coming all the time – this country is being handed to them on a plate’</I></blockquote>
Sound familiar? This isn’t xenophobic Brexiteer rhetoric or a Trump rant but is put into the 1930s mouth of Constance FitzAllen, a glamorous Englishwoman who comes from London to the rural backwaters ostensibly to write a book about bucolic Edens and homely Englishness. Harrison cleverly makes Connie attractive and only gradually allows the insinuating creep of her nasty ideologies to permeate the narrative.

Both a commentary on our world and a reminder of where similar sentiments ended before – with fascism across Europe, WW2 and the Holocaust – this is a book which dramatizes both the insidious pull of repellent politics and the extent to which they depend on skewed storytelling and invented mythologies. While Connie tries to idealise a rural England of bread-making, cheerful peasants and pastoral idealism, real farmers like the narrator’s father are struggling with absentee landlords, debts and confusion over whether they want government subsidies and import tariffs, or free trade.

This is the third book I’ve read recently which explores Britain’s flirtation with Oswald Mosley’s blackshirt fascism in the 1930s – and looking at some of our current politics and politicians it’s not hard to see why this has emerged as a topic with some heat and urgency. All the same, it’s a submerged strand in this book which, in the foreground, is concerned with the coming-of-age of 14 year old Edie, our narrator, against a beautifully-described rural landscape.

There are perhaps too many themes struggling for deeper treatment in this book: the clash between Edie’s bright intelligence and her family’s need for her on the struggling farm, the oppressive sexual relationship she falls into with a neighbour which raises issues of abuse/non-consent and sexual complicity, the vein of ‘madness’ that emerges and its treatment in the 1930s.

What holds this all together is Harrison’s lovely understated writing and her lyrical descriptions of the natural world. This feels like a straightforward read but the more I think about it, the cleverer it is at making literary capital out of various and sometimes contradictory relationships between present and past.

This is one of those rare, unforgettable books that will stay with me for a very long time and to which I shall return.

The narrative voice is almost hypnotic, reflecting that long, hot 1930s summer on the family farm in Suffolk. The Mather family and the neighbouring farmers seem to have been "hefted" to their land for centuries, becoming part of the landscape themselves.

This landscape is beautifully and realistically depicted as dynamic: it cannot stay as it is, it cannot return to its past but will inevitably change, for better or for worse. Even - especially - the older generation understands this, but a Londoner with nostalgia for the past, "ideal" rural life brings instability to the neighbourhood with disastrous effects.

As the narrator, now in her 70s, reflects on that summer, the reader reflects on the problems of adolescence, the treatment of women and those with mental health issues and, especially, the dangers of prejudice and nationalism evoked by a sentimental longing for a time in England that will never come back.

An object lesson for our times.

With many thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of "All Among the Barley" in exchange for this honest review.

All Among The Barley - Melissa Harrison's third novel - opens in Autumn 1933, and we meet 14-year-old Edith who lives on a Suffolk farm with her family. England is still recovering from the First World War, and Edith is increasingly aware of how she doesn't fit in among her peers and family members. Enter Constance FitzAllen, a liberal woman from London, visiting the countryside to document rural traditions and the lifestyles of its people. Edith strikes up a friendship with Constance, and this is the focus of the novel.

Harrison's writing is great, and she clearly excels are writing about the countryside. Like Clay, All Among The Barley has a heavy focus on nature (more so than in Clay, actually). Harrison is clearly incredibly knowledgeable about the topic and it shows. It is also apparent that a lot of research has gone into this book - particularly on folklore and farming methods of the era.

If you like books heavy on plot then All Among The Barley is probably not the book for you. Nothing particularly of note happened until about half way through, maybe even later in the book. The book is quite heavily descriptive, and there is a lot of the family working in the fields and Edith showing Constance around. This was all fine, but I began to lose interest after half a book of just this. Thankfully things picked up a bit in the second half of the book, although they did not go in the way I hoped/anticipated they would - I have to say I found the ending a bit abrupt and vague.

Overall I would still recommend picking this one up if you are either a fan of Melissa Harrison and/or historical fiction (particularly that about post-War Britain), as the writing and setting are both great. The plot just didn't quite work for me, unfortunately.

A blinder of a book: stunning nature writing that skilfully evokes a bygone world whilst also making it painfully clear that to romanticize that world is dangerous.

The perfect read for me this month - the long, hot summer of 1934 reflecting this unusual summer of 2018. For farmers in the depressed 1930s, the prospect of a good harvest at last couldn’t have come a moment too soon but the weather can be fickle and they are short of manpower after WWI - will they be able to pull it off? We have a glimpse of this feverish time through the eyes of 14-year-old Edie - a studious, unworldly, impressionable girl, young for her years, suggestible and superstitious. Her older sister would have helped her through her teenage years and the scary attentions of the boy next door had she not just got married, moved away and had a baby, and her mother is distracted by too much work, money worries and an irascible husband. So Edie is ready to be dazzled by a visitor to the village from London, the independent, outspoken Connie, gathering material for magazine articles about farming practices and traditional rural ways, who somehow seems able to charm her way into most everyone’s confidence and treats Edie for the first time in her life as someone worth listening to.

We are treated to an abundance of wonderful descriptions of the countryside of East Anglia and its wildlife. I adored all of this. One example of the gorgeous writing - ‘At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water’.

Below this glorious surface, though, is tension - economic and political. We know from the outset that this is the last harvest Edie will have at the farm, we don’t know why and I was on edge throughout as to what was going to happen. What does happen is nothing I had anticipated.

Change is on the way for everyone, not just the teenaged Edie, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. This novel gives a stunning picture of rural life in that short period between the two wars when the old ways and the new existed side by side. It has been a real joy to immerse myself in it.

A beautifully written book, I loved this and am seeking out the author’s previous novels. Set in the early 1930s, Edie is the teenage daughter of a tenant farmer. Farming is not going well and the family are finding it difficult to make ends meet, Edie’s father is finding it particularly difficult. Edie was born and brought up on the farm,( the author’s descriptions of the farm and farming life are particularly well written and beautiful), and has recently left school to help on the farm. Edie is a bright and scholarly child who loves reading, her teacher is keen that she should follow a career, but her family need her and her brothers friend from the neighbouring farm is showing Edie particular attention. Then an outsider cycles in, keen to learn about traditional farm life. This novel grabs you quickly, and is impossible to put down. As a farmers daughter myself, I felt particularly nostalgic when reading the descriptions of the countryside. This is a beautiful coming-of-age story, and I cannot recommend it highly enough!

I had heard of Melissa Harrison before, or rather it’s better to say that I had read of Melissa Harrison’s book before I picked up this one. I requested it on NetGalley simply because it sounded like it was something I would dearly enjoy reading. I was proven correct, thankfully.

The story starts with Edie, a young girl, living on the family farm. The very start of the book, we are given a foreboding beginning to the story. Edith tells us about herself a little bit, she lived on the family family farm. The Wych farm belonged to her father and her grandfather before that. It probably belongs to her brothers’ sons now but certain circumstances have made it impossible for her to know of it.

With this starting statement, I was immediately intrigued. What could have happened? Well, we learn that in the coming chapters. Edie was not quite the ‘normal’ teenager by her own estimation, telling us that she loved books more than she loved interacting with other children. She was often chastised for leaving tasks half-done, lost in her head with her vivid imagination keeping her company rather the task at hand.

Set in 1933-34, Edith knows that people haven’t quite recovered from the Great War and that another war might loom ahead in the dreary future however for the time being, Edie and her family were more concerned with harvest because autumn was already here. The pressure to harvest among concerns of a drought is already rampant when to add spice to their lives, a newcomer enters the picture.

Constance FitzAllen arrives in the village from London, with her modern attire and her assurances of keeping a record of the ‘rural living’ and ‘preserving beliefs and traditions of said rural living’. Her arrival changes Edie’s life drastically. Just how Edie’s life is forever changed is something you would have to find out but I must say that Melissa Harrison’s writing is so wonderfully controlled and yet vibrant that I have a feeling that I would definitely be looking for a copy of her earlier book.

Constance FitzAllen’s initial project starts to sound a bit more sinister as the time passes. From wanting to note down and preserve the rural life, Connie starts to hint at a more political agenda. That coupled with hints of Edie’s parents being debt, their relationships with farm workers, Edie’s life include the sexual advances she faces from a boy, Edie’s rather forceful superstitions…all of it culminates into something really wonderful and nostalgic. I felt nostalgia despite never being in Britain or knowing about their drought or living on a farm.

I especially loved the details that Harrison provided in the book, the way the seasons changed or the way she described the village or the farm life. That made it very easy for me to imagine the whole thing in my mind, such a descriptive and absolutely gorgeous writing! Just read this as an example and you will see why I fell hard for Harrison’s writing.

In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue, where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white. At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water. At last, wintering fieldfares and thrushes stripped the berries from the lanes, and at night the four tall elms for which the farm was named welcomed their cold-weather congregations of rooks. The dew dampened the stubble in the parched cornfields, drawing from it a mocking green aftermath.

An absolutely intriguing and attention grabbing book that talks about the mental health of one of the characters, of country life in 1930s in England and about growing up. It’s all written and handled so damn well that I can’t help but love it. I would absolutely recommend it to people who love historical fiction and those who would favour a seemingly pastoral novel that turns into something else entirely by the time we finish the book.

I had previously read and immensely enjoyed Melissa Harrison's non fiction work Rain which is an observant contemplative and at times lyrical reflection on our relationship with the weather as she explores the natural world and the effect on it of four rain showers in four seasons. Therefore I was much looking forward to discovering how her writing skills would be deployed in a fictional format, the results of which after I have now completed the book I find most impressive.

There are a number of themes explored here ranging from the role of women in a strictly patriarchal society to our definition of what we perceive to be mental illness and our treatment of it. However the overriding theme is the danger of mythologising the past and the need to question the motivation of those who seek this. The story is set in rural Suffolk in 1934 and is told in the first person narration by Edie a 14 year old girl who has just left school and is presently assisting with the duties on the family run tenanted farm. The author paints a detailed picture of what such a life would entail and the wonderfully evocative description of the countryside is in keeping with her previous writing from Rain. This is not an easy life and it has been made worse by the loss of farm labour caused by the causalities suffered in the Great War and the ongoing agricultural depression.

Entering this closed world comes an outsider Constance FitzAllen from London who is in the area to document the old now fading rural traditions and ways of life. Although at first this seems a quite benign pursuit the more the story develops we begin to realise that there is a deeply disturbing dark motivation and belief system that Constance has which manifested itself in the 1930's with many groups springing up looking back to a supposedly golden age which included many of the components of the new fascist creed. The destructive element that Constance brings into the community will have shattering effects on Edie and her family.

We know that Edie is looking back at the events of 1934 from some time in the future but we do not know from exactly when and how her life has progressed. When at the end we eventually find out it is both shocking and leaves a sense of profound shame for there were many who suffered the same fate. There are so many questions raised especially at a time when its seems that xenophobia and nativism have become normal in the last couple of years and the looking back at the illusory golden age is never far from the surface of a certain kind of political thinking. I believe this would make an admirable choice for a book discussion group and I would highly recommend this. Special mention should also be made of the evocative cover.

Farmer's daughter Edith looks back on a long hot pre-war summer, remembering the year that she left school at fourteen, and city-born Connie came to collect rural customs and traditions. But it gradually becomes clear that Edith's initial dreams for her future have significantly failed to materialise, and that behind the rural idyll lies poverty, illness and discontent.
The novel touches on many themes and issues, without labouring any of them - the contrast between the idealised urban view of country life and the reality of it, women's lives, pre-war politics and the sway of nationalism, mental illness, love... The sensitively drawn characters inhabit a landscape that is so vividly drawn that you can feel the heat and smell the hedgerows, and the natural world is beautifully evoked. Not least among the pleasures here is the opportunity to share a countryside before industrial farming, where corncrakes are commonplace enough to become pets.
This is a novel that I will return to - it is both thought-provoking and enjoyable.