Join us for a special launch day event with the author Melissa Harrison in celebration of her new novel, The Given World. Melissa will be joined in conversation with writer, conductor and bird watcher Lev Parikian, followed by a short Q&A and book signing.
All tickets include a bevvy.
The Given World
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 doctor realises, too late, that he has long underestimated his wife; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast and unsettling dream. And alone in a converted priory, overlooking watermeadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives news which will force her to reconsider her family’s past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.
About Melissa Harrison
Melissa Harrison is a novelist, nature writer, podcaster and children's author. Her 2018 novel All Among the Barley was the UK winner of the European Prize for Literature. Her work has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize and longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She lives in Suffolk.
“An Under Milk Wood for the 21st Century…so good.” - Amy Liptrott, author of The Outrun
“Extraordinary. A brilliantly acute social portrait for English rural life now. The best serious fiction I’ve read this year.” Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill
“I can’t think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty.” Evie Wyld, author of The Echoes