All Among The Barley

Melissa Harrison Bloomsbury €18.20

It’s Suffolk, 1933, and narrator Edie Mather is still a teenager, bookish and a little lonely, having lost her big sister to marriage and motherhood. When a glamorous, worldly stranger descends on the farm to document fading rural traditions, Edie is captivated, but Constance FitzAllen isn’t quite what she seems. Nostalgia, nationalism and superstition all play their part in an acutely observed narrative that is as pertinent to the here and now as it is evocative of its time and place.