At Hawthorn Time

Longlisted for the 2016 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Four-thirty on a May morning: the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere behind the treeline in the east. A long, straight road runs between sleeping fields to the little village of Lodeshill, and on it two cars lie wrecked and ravished, violence gathered about them in the silent air. One wheel, upturned, still spins.

Howard and Kitty have recently moved to Lodeshill after a life spent in London; now, their marriage is wordlessly falling apart. Custom car enthusiast Jamie has lived in the village for all of his nineteen years and dreams of leaving it behind, while Jack, a vagrant farm-worker and mystic in flight from a bail hostel, arrives in the village on foot one spring morning, bringing change. All four of them are struggling to find a life in the modern countryside; all are trying to find ways to belong.

Building to an extraordinary climax over the course of one spring month, At Hawthorn Time is both a clear-eyed picture of rural Britain, and a heartbreaking exploration of love, land and loss.

'A magical, hypnotically strange book of love and dreams, tragedy and myth, At Hawthorn Time sent shivers down my spine. Soaked deep in hedgerows and fields, it is a profoundly unsentimental yet deeply compassionate meditation on searching for myth and meaning, on our need to belong, and the place of history in the history of place. 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

'Top of anyone’s reading pile should be two beautifully written and original recent English novels – Will Cohu’s Nothing But Grass and Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time' AS Byatt

'Harrison’s love of the natural world and its traditions vibrates poetically through every page, but this is an up-to-date reading of the national psyche … Harrison’s imagination is wonderfully strange, her writing beautifully assured and controlled. 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 – which persists whether we understand it or not' The Times

'In graceful, measured and compelling prose, she can write whole pages about soil and stones, the hundred-year history of a hedge … Her level gaze, crisp prose and sharp insight make her a fresh and valuable voice in both fiction and nature writing' Guardian

'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 … Harrison writes with impressive detail about our hedgerows, fields, and woodlands … Carefully crafted writing' Independent on Sunday

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