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It is dawn on a May morning. On a long straight road between two sleeping fields a car slows as it arrives at the scene of an accident.
Howard and Kitty have been married for thirty years and now sleep in different rooms. They do not discuss it. It was always Kitty's dream to move from their corner of north London into the countryside, and when the kids were gone they moved to the village of Lodeshill. Howard often wonders if anyone who lives in this place has a reason to be there.
Jack was once a rural rebel, a protestor who only ever wanted the freedom to walk alone in his own country. Having finished another stint in prison for trespassing, he sets off once more, walking north with his old battered backpack.
Jamie is a nineteen-year-old Lodeshill boy who works in a distribution center and has a Saturday job at the bakery. He spent his childhood exploring the land with his grandfather and playing with Alex who lived in the farmhouse next-door.
As the lives of these people overlap, we realize that mysterious layers of history are not only buried within them, but also locked into the landscape. A captivating novel, At Hawthorn Time is about identity, consumerism, changing boundaries and our own long, straight path into the unknown.
"This elegant novel's true subject is its evolving pastoral setting." - Kirkus
"...Harrison's prose paints a stunning picture of the landscape, as her characters wistfully find themselves wishing for a past they can never get back." - Publishers Weekly
"Harrison presents a simple but compelling setting and way of life, expertly juxtaposed against the onslaught of development, technology, loss, death, and never-ending change that inflicts a thousand tiny cuts daily in the characters' personal armor." - Library Journal
"Splendid, closely observed ... acute, effortless ... [Harrison's] growing audience must hope to live long enough to read everything she writes." - The Spectator (UK)
"At Hawthorn Time is social satire, but also a political protest against the intensive and increasing privatisation of the countryside, and a love letter to the power of nature. " - The Times (UK)
"The novel is as much a hymn to the ancient life-force of nature as it is a reminder of the underlying fragility of our busy modern world." - Independent on Sunday (UK)
"If Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald were to co-author a book with John Burnside and Adam Foulds, it might end up something like At Hawthorn Time." - Financial Times
"At Hawthorn Time shows off a bracing talent in the tradition of Thomas Hardy, JL Carr and Henry Williamson." - Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Bracing and arresting." - The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"Thomas Hardy, were he around today, would no doubt approve: a determinedly contemporary pastoral tragedy, written with a keen sense of the natural world. Harrison has a lyrical turn of phrase." - The Daily Mail (UK)
"[Harrison's] level gaze, crisp prose and sharp insight make her a fresh and valuable voice in both fiction and nature writing." - The Guardian (UK)
"A magical, hypnotically strange book of love and dreams, tragedy and myth, At Hawthorn Time sent shivers down my spine...Harrison is writing us a new kind of modern pastoral: peopled, raw, messy, and shining." - Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
"At Hawthorn Time is intensely moving, a book overshadowed by disaster but still careful, precise, and hypnotically beautiful." - Evie Wyld, author of All The Birds, Singing
This information about At Hawthorn Time was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Melissa Harrison is a freelance writer and photographer for the Guardian and the Financial Times. Her debut novel Clay was published in 2013 and was the winner of Portsmouth First Fiction Award. She lives in South London.
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