
The Given World
Melissa Harrison(Author)
Hutchinson Heinemann (Publisher)
Published on 14. May 2026
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-1-5291-5489-4 (ISBN)
Description
'A state-of-the-countryside novel ... rich in detail but vast in scope' FINANCIAL TIMES
'A stunning tale of rural life ... Harrison earns a nod to George Eliot' ALEXANDRA HARRIS, GUARDIAN
'Extraordinary ... Harrison is a nonpareil describer of the natural world' INDIA KNIGHT
'Wonderful ... an Under Milk Wood for the twenty-first century' AMY LIPTROT
'Extraordinary ... The best serious fiction I've read this year' FRANCIS SPUFFORD
A FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2026
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.
'Attuned, loving and thoughtful ... I loved its warmth and intricacy' SARAH MOSS
'Nobody does nature better than Melissa Harrison' TRISTAN GOOLEY
'Reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives' EVIE WYLD
'A stunning tale of rural life ... Harrison earns a nod to George Eliot' ALEXANDRA HARRIS, GUARDIAN
'Extraordinary ... Harrison is a nonpareil describer of the natural world' INDIA KNIGHT
'Wonderful ... an Under Milk Wood for the twenty-first century' AMY LIPTROT
'Extraordinary ... The best serious fiction I've read this year' FRANCIS SPUFFORD
A FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2026
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.
'Attuned, loving and thoughtful ... I loved its warmth and intricacy' SARAH MOSS
'Nobody does nature better than Melissa Harrison' TRISTAN GOOLEY
'Reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives' EVIE WYLD
Reviews / Votes
A novel that reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives. I can't think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty. -- Evie Wyld A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I've read this year. Extraordinary ... An elegy for the death of the English countryside and also a beautiful demonstration of how a piece of realist literary fiction can subtly borrow from the fantastic, weaving in threads of the mythic and the unearthly that enrich the this-worldly sense the book is making. -- Francis Spufford I loved the way The Given World is at once warm and clever, meticulously attentive to place, plants and animals while insisting on human grace. Melissa Harrison's prose is strong and lovely as ever. -- Sarah Moss A wonderful reading experience ... It is careful and full of care and I loved learning the rhythms and concerns of the characters and understanding their connections. It's an authentic and deeply observed multiperspective portrait of a village. An Under Milk Wood for the twenty-first century. It's just so fucking good. -- Amy Liptrot The Given World is a superb and timely novel, lit and linked by people, place and time. It sings with symbolism and beautifully reflects the frightening and uncanny transitions of our time - natural, personal, national, historical - through the microcosm of a village and landscape that comes to life spectacularly through Harrison's brilliant mastery of description and detail. Spirited, spirit-filled, strange, resonant, heartbreaking and poignant, The Given World rings through the reader like a struck bell. -- Rob Cowen A truly groundbreaking novel, setting the day-to-day rhythms of rural life against troubling and sinister shifts in nature's calendar. Melissa Harrison's forensic portrayal of the village and its residents - wild and human, old and new - deserves a place at the very heart of the English post-pastoral canon. -- Stephen Moss The Given World is a village symphony, the finest work yet by a writer in her prime, she animates whatever she focuses on, characters live, we see them, we know them. The novel roams around the village, from one inhabitant to another, each one described with great warmth and psychological acuity, during a year when the seasons are in turmoil. Characters' relations to each other coexist with the interconnecting nature around them, while beneath everything builds a dread that changes are building, too enormous to face head on. -- Tim Pears Precious few writers can set a story in nature convincingly and nobody does it better than Melissa Harrison. A tale of honest rural intensity that grips and surprises. -- Tristan Gooley Uncanny, knowing and wonderful, The Given World reminds us the countryside is no timeless idyll: it is of time, past, present, mythological and future, and sometimes, wears it in sharper relief than anywhere else, if you know, as Melissa Harrison does, where and how to look. A richly compelling form of the New Pastoral, or climate fiction, The Given World is as bright, resonant, urgent and startling as the clamour of long-silenced bells rung out one evening. -- Nicola Chester Melissa Harrison doesn't just write the English countryside, she decocts, extracts, distills and blends its essences into fiction so real-world adjacent it haunts. The Given World is a masterful portrait of our time and place, which like the unquestionably animate river running through it, will not be contained. -- Amy-Jane BeerMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Cornerstone
Dimensions
Height: 220 mm
Width: 142 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
385 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5291-5489-4 (9781529154894)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Melissa Harrison
The Given World
The extraordinary new novel of connection, belonging and loss from the award-winning author of All Among the Barley
E-Book
05/2026
Penguin (Cornerstone)
€12.99
Available for download
Person
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.