I loved dogs and wasn’t able to have one of my own, so they were mine for a short while, by virtue of me being a guest. My grandad owned it and my uncle lived there, so every holiday, we visited and Christmastime was always spent “at the farm”.

He had been a schoolmaster in Suffolk but became fascinated by recollections by country folk of the old days, what life was like before the 1914-1918 war.Hard work and a simplicity of life and the limited scale of opportunities available to most individuals at that time. I read quite a lot of literature that was written in the 1930s and ’40s, and the period detail in this novel seems very authentic. Whether I am permitted to or not, I love the world which Melissa Harrison evokes, for all its inevitable shortcomings.

her central character Edie, many decades later, looks forward to ending her days going back to where she had spent her formative years, presumably hoping to find it as she left it. I’m hoping this piece will qualify for Karen and Lizzy’s Reading Independent Publishers Month, which you can read about here. Her second novel, the Costa-shortlisted At Hawthorn Time, presented a determinedly modern portrait of rural life that, while full of wonder, could also be bleak and brutal. The rhythms and rituals of farming are also beautifully portrayed, augmenting the novel’s captivating sense of time and place. It describes a land resplendent and saturated with summer, but known dangers flicker on the edges: debt, crop failure, illness and accident .I found the increasing strangeness, and subsequent jump to the end of her life, of the main character rather sudden and it slightly marred the rest of the story. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

For Edie, who has just finished school and must soon decide what to do with her life, Connie appears to be a godsend. Some of the great themes of English life are tackled here - class division, the patriarchy, folklore and psychosis, creeping fascism - but rather than being simply ticked off they are instead woven into the narrative with great subtlety and beauty . Incidentally it was also Orwell who, in the late 1930s, shrewdly pointed out that Fascism had become an empty term of abuse used by anyone to describe anything they didn’t much like.For those of us, like myself, who have grown up in the countryside, it is not in the least bit disappointing that the hardships and drawbacks of a life lived on the land – especially in that era – be fairly portrayed and indeed, how can one truly appreciate light unless it is in the context of shades of dark?

Here is someone who appears to be interested in the impressionable young Edie as a person, viewing her as an individual with her own thoughts and opinions, not just another member of the Mather family.Edie observes these signs but does not always understand what they mean, just as she does not understand the lurking shadows of war, either the one that has passed or the one that threatens the future. Wi She wrote and performed five episodes of the long-running Tweet of the Day slot on Radio 4, where her short story The Black Dog was also broadcast; she delivered a Proms interval talk on Radio 3, and wrote and performed an instalment of Radio 3’s The Essay, about Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, Wales. How times have changes in the way farming is approached and handled, not to mention the treatment of farm labourers, workers and family. The novel’s epilogue is very affecting, a section in which seventy-year-old Edie contemplates her current situation – a life marked by events that took place during Constance’s visit.