Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately, it was not a good fit for me. I read the first 20% but found that I was unable to engage at all with the characters or the story and so for me this is a DNF. I am sure there are others for who this is a better fit.

An excellent read, beautifully written, thought provoking and highly emotive. It wasn't fast paced yet held my attention throughout. This story is one revealing a families secrets and lies, those uncovered, perhaps believed to be irretrievably buried until a son, Jonathan's Japanese girlfriend comes to visit his family's homestead in Norfolk. Their hidden secrets and bitter lies are gradually uncovered and can no longer be denied.
I found this book captivating and beautifully written. It's not one I'll forget in a hurry.

An intriguing exploration of cross-border relationships, but maddeningly slow pacing--I couldn't get into this.

Harvest by Georgina Harding is the story of a family, two brothers and their mother, over the course of a harvest, when the youngest brothers girlfriend comes to stay with them from Japan.

The story is very slow paced and atmospheric. The writing is beautiful, although at times I found myself skim reading sections that was solely about gardening when it was the mother's point of view.

I'm not sure that I actually felt connected to the characters or to the story, however, I was 80% of the way through when I discovered that this is the 3rd book in a trilogy about this family so I was annoyed with myself for not realising this sooner!

So I will be adding the first two books to my TBR!

Thank you to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for an advanced reader copy in return for an honest review

Sadly I did not enjoy this one that much and I found some parts of this book to be not as engaging and just felt a little bored through it

This was a mesmerising read with a very slow burn which kept me intrigued to the very end.

I expected this to be a love story between Jonathan and his Japanese girlfriend, Kumiko - but by the end of the novel, it is clear that she is a catalyst for a family event which has nurtured a deep, dark secret for many years.

The prose is slow and rambling as the story drifts like memories and different characters histories evolve. Nature is a metaphor for life as the mother Claire loses herself and her grief in her garden, whilst the family try to live their lives as farmers harvesting the spoils of their land. The relationship between mother, sons and brothers are prickly and fractured. Kumiko serves to rupture those fractures and free the secret which both separates and binds. It is Kumiko's 'foreignness' set against the English landscape that brings splashes of colour and release emotions.

The story seemed to me to emphasise the family's inability to talk honestly and openly. The story is set against a backdrop of various wars and conflicts which has affected the men in the novel. The Japanese seem to be unnecessarily blamed for this localised trauma and the wider pervading issues that arise from Charlie's experiences of the war.

I felt like I was reading about the stiff upper lip of 'being British from the viewpoint of Kumiko, though it is not her voice that you hear. A haunting read which I have found difficult to absorb.

A young photojournalist leaves Japan and returns home to Norfolk where his mother and brother run the family farm. He sends his Japanese girlfriend an invitation to visit, and she becomes a catalyst to revive old memories, secrets and grief that have been simmering within the family.
This was a very atmospheric and visual novel, understated in tone but with a depth of feeling. I did feel a bit detached from it and did not feel absorbed in the story, but have since found that it is the third in a trilogy and it would probably have been more meaningful had I read the other books first.

You know how there are some stories you pick up last because you’re not sure if you’ll love them as much as some of the others on your shelves? Well this was one of those for me, and yet it turns out I did love it - so much so that I read it all in one sitting!

This is a really gentle, elegant story that seized me from the moment I read the first page. It’s a story of loss, secrets, lies and the grief which propels us forward, and it is told against the backdrop of a farm and its harvest.

When Jonathan’s Japanese girlfriend Kumiko comes to stay at his family home, with his mother Claire and brother Richard, family secrets which have been long buried will become fresh wounds again.

Narrated by all of the characters in turn, and moving through the past and present, this is quite a dark and tragic story, and yet there’s also something quite breathtaking about it - perhaps in the surroundings of the farm, and in the beautiful garden which Claire tends to. The characters are compelling and don’t quite seem to all fit together, and yet it’s only by having them all together that we get to the powerful truth of the story.

It’s difficult to explain precisely what it is that captured me so much with this - it’s definitely more of a slow, quiet, literary novel rather than anything overly dramatic, but I just found myself devouring it. A testament to Harding’s writing, and the power of nuanced characters!

Harvest is the third novel in the cycle of the Ashe family saga about the far-reaching consequences and legacy of war, the impact of trauma and how long-buried family secrets nearly always come back to devastate in the future. It begins in the early 1970s with Jonathan ”Jonny” Ashe returning home from Japan and his adventures and exploits in East Asia. A young photojournalist, Jonny was responsible for one of the defining images of the Vietnam war. But that sort of fame didn't sit well with him and he moved to Tokyo, seeking refuge in the city’s anonymity. He has now migrated back to his family’s farm in bleak but beautiful Norfolk. After getting settled in and with six months having gone by, he sends his Japanese girlfriend, Kumiko, a stunning photograph of luminous yellow daffodils swaying in the Spring breeze with him stood in the centre arms outstretched willing her to travel to Britain and importantly highlighting that it was not always drab and dull in terms of the weather. On the back, as if his stance hasn't been clear enough, he wrote: ”come and see me”, in soft pencil. The invitation was to the Norfolk farm his veteran father, Charles, had taken on once the Second World War had ended. Johnny and Kumiko had met and fallen in love when he turned up at the English language school where she worked one day. He had hit on lucky and was offered a job teaching English to Japanese students in Tokyo as someone had just left.

They had begun to talk due to their mutual concern over a student who was no longer turning up for classes. From there they had fallen deeply in love and the job, as well as Kimiko, can both be credited as helping him to move on from the stress and constant anxiety he felt as a world-renowned photographer. Back in present-day, she decides to spend the summer with him in England; he picks her up from a long flight at Heathrow Airport, and they hope to make plans to travel together when harvest is over and he has earned some cash from helping his brother, Richard, to reap, gather and store the crops. Through time Jonny’s mother, Claire, is taken aback by how much she has warmed to Kimiko, who she was once wary of due to Japan’s loyalty during the war, and she comes to mean a lot to her. Her animated, upbeat nature was a refreshing change to the troubled family who had been in a pit of depression and despair ever since Charles’ sudden death. They would share many touching moments marvelling at the beauty of Claire's garden; the blooms, the vivid colours and the solace it all brings. However, Richard remains distant and resolute about running the farm properly to follow in the footsteps of his father who had apparently died when he and Jonathan were both children. He was seemingly involved in a fatal but accidental shooting incident, which is shrouded in mystery.

But as the summer progresses the tension between the two brothers becomes palpable and this makes Jonathan eager to fulfil his promises helping to harvest the crops and then leave with Kimiko as quickly as possible. Richard not only treats his brother with contempt but often the innocent Kimiko too. This is a captivating and compelling yarn featuring the deeply troubled and grief-stricken Ashe family. With a taut and unsettling plot, this powerful fine meditation on war’s long reach follows on from the previous novels but works just as well on its own. It is a graceful immersion in family dynamics, secrets and memory, told through carefully crafted prose with the background hum of the turn of seasons, beautiful descriptions of the East Anglian countryside and sexual tension. Shifting back and forth between past and present, no one writes about more the mundane, quotidian nature of life with such majesty managing to have you enthralled and absorbed throughout, and I found that the atmosphere - characterised by an underlying, perturbing palpable tension running the entirety of the plot - has you on edge waiting for the breaking point to arrive. Harvest is a story of love, grief, familial duty, being an outsider and the complex interplay between all of these themes, set against the repeated metaphor of gardens, farming and harvest. A beautiful, powerful and utterly devastating read. Highly recommended.

In Harvest, we hear about the story of a family while Kumiko, the Japanese girlfriend of one of the sons, comes to visit the farm in England where they live and they wait for the weather to allow them to harvest their fields.
The story goes back and forth between the past and the present.
I am not sure how I feel about this book. I spent the first half waiting for something to actually happen. I liked the premise, and the way the book started (and, in general, the parts of the story when Kumiko is in England), but then the point of view changes to that of the mother, and at that point the story became fairly boring. It's such a short book, that I feel like the word 'boring' should not be part of a review of it.
The prose is beautiful, and at some parts it was the only thing that kept me interested.
I think there are two main reasons for my boredom:
The first one is the way the book description is crafted. "But the summer sun cannot dispel the shadows of the family’s buried past, a terrible loss and an unspoken violence carried back from a distant country and a distant war; a trauma that begins to surface in the present, as the wheat ripens and the days pass." This (at least to me) gives the impression of much more action than there actually is. This 'trauma that surfaces in the present' is only about 5% of the book.
The second reason is that the parts of this book that referred to life in a farm (i.e., the majority of the book), reminded me a lot of another book I read recently. Otherwise, I think I would have learnt quite a bit, and enjoyed it much more, so don't let my review put you off if you want to learn about work in a farm.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book in exchange for an honest opinion.

Harvest is a story of love, grief, familial duty, being an outsider and the complex interplay between all of this, set against the repeated metaphor of gardens, farming and (yes) harvest. There are passages that are quite beautifully phrased, and the inner thoughts of the four lead characters as they reminisce are illuminating, but I didn’t really engage with it.
I found at afterwards that this is a follow up to an earlier novel and- whilst I don’t believe you need to have read that - I suspect it tells of a more interesting emotional journey.

Beautifully written. I enjoyed Georgina Harding's Harvest from start to finish.
The childhood farm setting evokes duty, confines, and a strong sense of home, purpose and identity. It's pages are full of love, exploration, ties and other worlds. Ultimately we are bound together through family, experience, trauma and also secrets.
Superb detail, highly visual and warm. We explore the characters page by page. Whilst I didn't want it to end, I thought the ending perfect.

'𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑺𝒆𝒑𝒕𝒆𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒐𝒚𝒔 𝒘𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒂𝒘𝒂𝒚 𝒕𝒐 𝒔𝒄𝒉𝒐𝒐𝒍. 𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒑𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒅𝒊𝒅, 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒆 𝒅𝒂𝒚𝒔. 𝑰𝒕 𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒆 𝒔𝒐 𝒎𝒖𝒄𝒉 𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒔𝒆, 𝒑𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒔𝒂𝒊𝒅, 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒕𝒘𝒐 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎 𝒕𝒐 𝒈𝒐, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒐𝒈𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓. 𝑰𝒕’𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆 𝒈𝒐𝒐𝒅 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎, 𝒑𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒔𝒂𝒊𝒅, 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚’𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒃𝒐𝒚𝒔 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆. 𝑷𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒂𝒍𝒘𝒂𝒚𝒔 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒔𝒂𝒚. 𝑷𝒆𝒐𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒏𝒐𝒓𝒎𝒂𝒍. 𝑻𝒐 𝒊𝒎𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒏𝒐𝒓𝒎𝒂𝒍 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏 𝒊𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔𝒏’𝒕 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒆. 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒘𝒂𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒕𝒐 𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝒊𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒗𝒆𝒔 𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒅. 𝑰𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒏’𝒕 𝒂 𝒘𝒉𝒐𝒍𝒆 𝒇𝒂𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒌 𝒐𝒇 𝒊𝒕.'

𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭 by 𝐆𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 is a story of the family of a single mother and her two boys. It is the story of a family loss, the loss of a huge and significant figure of a father and a husband in boys and Claire’s lives.

The novel touches on an important issue that was avoided being spoken about in the past. Even these days people tend to avoid talking about it, especially the older generation. There is a slight shame felt in it. Long-term exposure to war can cause serious psychological problems. Charles, the father who commits a suicide in the novel 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭, was one of those who could not cope with it, who never spoke about it, who never asked for help, who lived with his thoughts long past the War unable to forget. Now, you have a woman with two little boys in a farm trying to sort her life out on her own; a father is long time gone.

The story shifts all the time: from the present to the past then again back to the present. The reader gets to see the whole, complete picture of the family, the whole dynamics of it.

Beautiful melancholy, wistful tones are set through the entire novel. The characters are very real and dynamic. It is amusing to be able to see life through all of their eyes even though the story is told through the 3rd person’s narrative, we get close to each of these characters.

Overall, 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭 is such a beautiful novel. Something to be really excited for. Bring it on, 2021!

Harvest follows a family of three, Jonathan, Richard and their mother, Claire over the course of a harvest in the Norfolk countryside when Jonny's girlfriend Kumiko comes to visit them from Japan.

This book is a graceful immersion in family dynamics, secrets and memory, told through carefully crafted prose with the background hum of the turn of seasons, beautiful descriptions of the East Anglian countryside and sexual tension.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. I enjoyed the fluidity between different character's points of view and memory and action without it being sign-posted; it made it feel that the characters were interlinked and gave a real feeling of family to the piece. I am currently living in East Anglia and it is harvest time, so it felt extremely evocative and real. I also loved the way the plot unravelled, though it is a book that is much more about how the story is told than the story itself.

It is a gentle read that is very satisfying; partly due to the language is beautifully poised and partly for the structure of the story.

Thank you to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for an advance reader copy of Harvest in return for an honest review.

Although still in his mid-twenties, Jonathan has already received acclaim as a photographer in Vietnam War. Having grown disillusioned with this calling, he spends some time as a language teacher in Tokyo, and then returns to the farm in Norfolk where he grew up. His father died, allegedly in a “shooting accident” when Jonny was just seven, but his mother Claire still lives there, together with his elder brother Richard, who now runs the farm. Jonny is soon joined by Kimiko, his Japanese girlfriend, who has heard much about her partner’s past and his childhood home and now has the chance to experience them for herself:

She had asked him to tell her about his home, many times. She wanted to know so that she could know him better, so that she had some world to fit him into, that he came from, so that he had some dimension deeper than being just an Englishman who had come to Japan…

The couple decide to stay on to help with the harvest, before resuming their travels. But rain delays the job and a brief English holiday becomes, for Kumiko, a summer among a family with its fair share of secrets, a family haunted by its past.

Although recounted in the third person, the novel’s point of view keeps changing throughout, presenting us with the different perspectives of the four main characters. It starts and ends in Kumiko’s voice and yet her character is – ironically, and deliberately – the one which remains most mysterious, the one which we least get to know on a personal level. For the other characters including, one suspects, Jonathan himself, Kumiko remains “the Japanese girl”, an outsider, a glitch in an otherwise English pastoral. But, precisely because of her “foreignness” Kumiko becomes a catalyst for the family, leading them to face an uncomfortable past.

This novel is a little gem which I enjoyed at so many different levels. Jonathan is a photographer and, appropriately, the descriptions have a strong “visual” element, occasionally vibrant with yellows and golds, at other times “grey and brown and ochre… black even”. Nature is not only vividly portrayed but, as in a Hardy novel, it becomes almost a character in itself, a timeless backdrop to the family drama which plays out in the novel.

I loved the tone of the novel: melancholy, wistful and poignant. Harding subtly conveys the complicated psychological strands which link the characters, particularly Claire’s fraught relationship with her late husband and the underlying rivalry between the brothers whose life-story is indelibly marked by the tragic death of their father. The title of the novel is not just a reference to the literal “harvest”, in which Jonny and Kumiko participate, but becomes a metaphorical one, as the family reaps the seeds sown in its past.

Understated, yet complex and satisfying, Georgina Harding’s “Harvest” is a novel to watch (and read) in 2021.

Slow-paced, dreamy sequel to the beautifully moving Land of the Living which could be read as a stand-alone novel but it adds to the tension if you’ve already read the first book. War traumatised Charlie has died leaving Claire to bring up their two young boys alone on the farm. A shooting accident she tells them, he must have slipped climbing over the gate, but 7 year old Jonathan had woken early and followed his father out of the house so he has a secret knowledge that Richard, as the eldest, would dearly love to share. Fast forward to adulthood and Richard is happily running the farm while Jonathan has struggled to settle and travelled to the Far East in search of his father’s past, accidentally becoming a famous war photographer on the way. In Japan he’s met a pretty girl Komiko who has now come to the Suffolk farm to visit but feels like an outsider when Claire puts her in the spare room rather than Jonathan’s. Over the summer they get to know each other as they wait for the crop to ripen and then the rain to end so that Jonathan can help with the harvest before they move on. Claire shares her love of gardening with long lyrical descriptions of her daily work keeping on top of the weeds and the fabulous rose garden. Richard is totally wrapped up in the farm, a way of life he sees as following in his father’s footsteps but the rivalry between the two men is always simmering under the surface. Slowly, as the weather shows no sign of improving, the tension is built up between the four of them until it’s only a matter of time before something will break.