The Given World

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

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

The Given World is a dark pastoral, deliciously laced with a hint of the supernatural. Through her nuanced characters, Melissa Harrison draws our attention to shifting political currents and contrasting ideologies. I’m full of gratitude for her gifts – she is a deeply sensitive and empathetic writer, even-handed about both rural and urban lives. That’s not something to be taken for granted in these polarising times.

Jini Reddy

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

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

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

Written with verve and precision, The Given World is an exquisite evocation of all that we should hold dear – and all that we stand to lose.

Sharon Blackie

A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I’ve read this year. Extraordinary.

Francis Spufford

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

If you love words that drip like honey; if you love people in all their mess and glory; if you love this wild, unpredictable, beautiful world; please, please read this book.

Josie George

An achingly beautiful rural tale.

Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking

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

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

A dark pastoral set in the Welm Valley, where the river misbehaves and villagers share a recurring, uncanny dream. Through multiple voices, Harrison conjures a community sensing that something has shifted, writing about the English countryside and its people with her customary distilled intensity in a book about change and belonging in an apparently unchanged landscape.

Observer Books to Look Out for in 2026

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