‘Instantly beautiful in its calm and wise tone’
Robert Macfarlane
‘Heartfelt, elegaic ... Lovingly observed’
Observer
‘A gently-evoked urban tragedy – and the most powerful and original debut novel I’ve read for years’
A.N.Wilson
https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/melissa-harrison/
Click here to order
At Hawthorn Time
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2015
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS PRIZE 2016
An exquisite novel about four people’s lives, our changing relationship with the landscape and what it means to belong.
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.
‘Intensely moving, a book overshadowed by disaster but still careful, precise, and hypnotically beautiful’
Evie Wyld
‘A magical, hypnotically strange book of love and dreams, tragedy and myth, At Hawthorn Time sent shivers down my spine … Profoundly unsentimental yet deeply compassionate’
Helen Macdonald
‘A gently-evoked urban tragedy – and the most powerful and original debut novel I’ve read for years’
A.N.Wilson
‘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’
Kate Saunders, The Times
https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/melissa-harrison/
First published in Great Britain 2018
This electronic edition published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Melissa Harrison, 2018
Illustrations © Neil Gower, 2018
Extract from Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell by George Orwell published by Secker. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1968
Melissa Harrison has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London
WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-9799-7; TPB: 978-1-4088-9798-0; EBOOK: 978-1-4088-9801-7
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters