Melissa Harrison

A novel that reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives. I can’t think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty.

A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I’ve read this year. Extraordinary.

I loved the way The Given World is at once warm and clever, meticulously attentive to place, plants and animals while insisting on human grace. Melissa Harrison’s prose is strong and lovely as ever.

A wonderful reading experience ... It is careful and full of care and I loved learning the rhythms and concerns of the characters and understanding their connections. It's an authentic and deeply observed multiperspective portrait of a village. An Under Milk Wood for the twenty-first century. It's just so fucking good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Written with verve and precision, The Given World is an exquisite evocation of all that we should hold dear – and all that we stand to lose.

'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 
 
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.

Melissa Harrison

Praise for The Given World

A novel that reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives. I can’t think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty.

A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I’ve read this year. Extraordinary.

I loved the way The Given World is at once warm and clever, meticulously attentive to place, plants and animals while insisting on human grace. Melissa Harrison’s prose is strong and lovely as ever< ...

A novel that reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives. I can’t think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty.

A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I’ve read this year. Extraordinary.

I loved the way The Given World is at once warm and clever, meticulously attentive to place, plants and animals while insisting on human grace. Melissa Harrison’s prose is strong and lovely as ever< ...

A novel that reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives. I can’t think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty.

A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I’ve read this year. Extraordinary.

I loved the way The Given World is at once warm and clever, meticulously attentive to place, plants and animals while insisting on human grace. Melissa Harrison’s prose is strong and lovely as ever< ...

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter