I had expected ducks or moorhens to explode from the margins, as they would have had I gone into the pond by the house, but it seemed that no wildfowl made this pond their home.

Connie has an idealistic and patronising view of country people although she develops great affection, not only for Edie, but for her family and the wider community. Although I did not know her well yet, I felt more real, more interesting even, when I saw myself through Constance’s eyes. Her older sister Mary has recently married and lives nearby (Edie struggling with the sudden break in their relationships) as do her mother’s parents (Granfer and her squint eyed and mysterious Grandmother).As an evocation of place and a lost way of life, Harrison’s novel is astonishing, as potent and irresistible as a magic spell. As Constance begins to spend more time with the Mathers, her views on certain political and financial principles begin to emerge. Incidentally it was also Orwell who, in the late 1930s, shrewdly pointed out that Fascism had become an empty term of abuse used by anyone to describe anything they didn’t much like. Running through the book is the need for farmers to balance the preservation of traditional methods with the drive for progression and change.

She’s the object of a fair bit of unwelcome attention from Alf, a somewhat pushy boy from a neighbouring farm. Edie was a “an odd child … by the pragmatic, practical standards of the farming families thereabouts”, preferring “the company of books to other children” and given to absent mindedness and interior dialogue sometime spilling over into talking to herself aloud. I really enjoyed the way the author explores the nature of change and how people shape their own fortune through the way that they react to their circumstances. It is only as harvest approaches and economic pressures begin to bite that the villagers understand she wants more from them than just their stories. I loved dogs and wasn’t able to have one of my own, so they were mine for a short while, by virtue of me being a guest.This causes enough tension to sweep the reader along towards an ending you might not quite be prepared for.

A deeply atmospheric work, steeped in the rhythms and traditions of the English countryside and the rhythms and traditions of its literature. Connie takes a shine to Edith, who shows her round the village, and helps the visitor any way she can. It takes a while for Constance to show her true colours, but the hints are dotted here and there throughout . The central character and narrator is Edith Mather, a 14 year-old farm girl in East Anglia who has just completed her formal schooling and ought to embarking on a life as a nanny or even a teacher. We guess that there will be more to this young woman than meets the eye and that her friendship with 14-year-old Edie is likely ultimately to blow up in some dramatic way.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

For me this raised so many questions around our understanding of mental health issues at that time and the flaws (well documented and commented on) of 'care in the community' as a supportive route for anyone. In the course of the story, female emancipation and modernization are met and challenged, as are anti Semitic views in practice. What holds this all together is Harrison’s lovely understated writing and her lyrical descriptions of the natural world. her central character Edie, many decades later, looks forward to ending her days going back to where she had spent her formative years, presumably hoping to find it as she left it. This feels like a straightforward read but the more I think about it, the cleverer it is at making literary capital out of various and sometimes contradictory relationships between present and past.No spoilers, but it casts the remainder of the book in a somewhat different light, illuminating the tragic consequences of the visitor’s beliefs and actions.