The Given World

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

Francis Spufford

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.

Sarah Moss

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.

Amy Liptrot

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

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

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 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

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.

Sharon Blackie