The Given World

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 Beer