Harvest

A powerfully disquieting novel about trauma, war and family, by the Orange Prize-shortlisted author of Painter of Silence

So fresh and free she looked, in the yellow dress. Sunlight to blaze away the shadows.

A Japanese girl comes to visit her English lover in the house where he was born. She comes to it on a day of perfect summer, stands with his mother in a garden tangled with flowers; the fields beyond, his brother’s wheatfields, are a green that soon will turn to gold.

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.

A poised and gracefully crafted novel about the power of submerged secrets, about departures and homecomings, about invisible scars and hidden grief, Harvest asks what happens when we come to reap what has been sown.