All Among the Barley

Melissa Harrison / Bloomsbury

In autumn 1933, Wych Farm in Suffolk, England, is the whole world for 14-year-old Edie Mather. The loss of a generation of young men in the Great War has left farms shorthanded, there’s a pressing need to bring in the harvest and Edie has been pulled out of school to help. Caught up in the daily routine, she daydreams about her future. Motherhood doesn’t appeal. Nor does marriage to the boorish son of a wealthy neighbour. The idea that she may have inherited her grandmother’s “witchcraft” skills is pleasantly diverting but true distraction arrives from London in the form of Constance, who dresses like a man and is documenting disappearing rural traditions and beliefs. However, the modern woman’s glamour cloaks a fascination with fascism. As the onset of harvest adds urgency to the rural roundabout, a sense of imminent change grows impossible to ignore. Melissa Harrison is also a “nature writer” (Rain: Four Walks in English Weather) and here celebrates an Arcadian golden age that is no more. She marries the seeming timelessness of rustic rhythms with a feeling of looming loss, her prose painting a picture of bucolic beauty alongside an undercurrent of foreboding, where wallowing in nostalgia can blind you to the inevitability of change.