All Among the Barley

This book was published in 2018 and yet it already feels like a true classic.

It is the beautiful, poignant, and often poetic story of a rural community as one world war ends but the threat of an unsettled nation still lies heavily in the air.

Told through the eyes of a child on the brink of adulthood, there are moments of such naïve tenderness it pulled hard at my maternal senses. 

The early part of the twentieth century saw so much change in the lives of small communities and I found this investigation of how the shifting world affected… show more.

Is this historical fiction or is it sublime nature writing?  Answer: it's both. Melissa Harrison completely immersed me into the rural Sussex world of Edie in 1933, a world unchanged for centuries. It is described in achingly beautiful, hypnotic, poetic language: the kind of prose I'd hoped I would write when I turned from poetry to fiction, but which has so far escaped me. I was utterly captivated by the multi-textured world she creates, and the shock of the ending, and the darkness which lies beneath. I loved the way she trusted the reader to understand what was going on,… show more.