ALL AMONG THE BARLEY

(Bloomsbury £16.99)

FAST emerging as one of our finest nature writers, Melissa Harrison combines a deep knowledge of our rural landscape with an unsentimental understanding of how our environment informs the way we live.

Her third novel takes place in a Suffolk village in the Thirties, where the teenage narrator, Edie, a farmer’s daughter, has become transfixed by a glamorous Londoner, Constance. The woman is visiting the village to record the old ways of rural life before they disappear for ever.

Readers become aware of Constance’s more sinister political allegiances long before Edie does, but although Harrison is interesting on the history of rural fascism in England before the war, she is absolutely excellent at evoking the byways, misunderstandings and sexual crisis of adolescence. She also has fun skewering the modern fetishising of rural life.

At times the plot feels a bit overcrowded, but it’s a still a beautiful and wholly tragic novel.