05/18/2015
In Harrison’s wondrous second novel (after Clay), disparate lives converge in a remote part of the British countryside. There’s Jack, a vagrant prone to poetic musing, living on seasonal work and eschewing the security of putting down roots. Then there’s Kitty and Howard, empty nesters grappling with the change in their relationship, especially after having left London for the countryside—a wish of Kitty’s that Howard agreed to after retiring from a business that he left in his son’s hands, without really thinking through what that would mean for him. Kitty, seeking solace in the local church and finding her artistic voice through painting, is also coming to terms with a past infidelity and a looming concern about her health. And then there’s Jamie, a young man with a warehouse job, finding his way in the world and hoping to better himself. A fateful accident brings the characters together, and 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. (July)
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, author of ALL THE BIRDS, SINGING
“This elegant novel's true subject is its evolving pastoral setting.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Splendid, closely observed . . . acute, effortless . . . [Harrison's] growing audience must hope to live long enough to read everything she writes.” —The Spectator (UK)
“Harrison's love of the natural world and its traditions vibrates poetically through every page . . . [Her] 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.” —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)
“Our changing countryside—both the place and the people in it—is wonderfully explored.” —Harper's Bazaar
“In part an elegy for our dwindling connection with nature . . . Harrison strips away our idealized pastoral vision to unveil the real countryside, lamenting its many losses yet also encouraging us to discover and celebrate the beauty that remains.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Brings to the forefront the extremely personal and private ways that we can live as individuals while simultaneously highlighting the impermanence of that individualism. Combined with graceful and delicate language about nature and the English countryside—which could in many ways be called a fifth, unnamed and ever-present character in the novel—At Hawthorn Time is a quiet meditation on the unexpected beauty of both the individual and the community, and the changing landscape in which the two exist.” —ShelfAwareness
"This is an account of rural life, but a realistic one, a novel of our modern countryside of incomers and misfits, with a terrific ending, built into the start, which snaps shut like a gin trap at the finish. A gripping story which lingers in the mind." —The Independent
06/01/2015
Selected for Amazon's Rising Stars program for her debut novel, Clay, Harrison returns with a superb sophomore effort featuring four characters whose lives intersect in the rural village of Lodeshill, England. Howard and Kitty, a retired married couple, have moved from London to pursue Kitty's desire to paint. Howard remains ambivalent about the move, just one of the many factors driving the couple apart. Jamie, a young man, yearns to break free of his family ties yet feels connected to the environment. He shares this longing with Jack, an older, free-spirited wanderer best described as a vagrant. Though these characters are separate in thought, feeling, and ambition, the author draws them together with her detailed portrait of the countryside; each chapter commences with a one-line description of the natural surroundings. VERDICT 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. Ultimately an intimate but sorrowful tale that most libraries will want to include in their contemporary fiction collections.—Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis
2015-04-15
Harrison (Clay, 2013) describes the small details and grand scope of nature in the hills and forests of Lodeshill, a village north of London, where multiple narratives of longing and loss converge. The book ends and begins with the car accident that brings together disparate characters inhabiting the same landscape. Jack, who has been tramping for more than 20 years, returns to Lodeshill on foot, looking for seasonal work picking asparagus on one of its farms. Afraid of being caught skipping out on his prison release terms and arrested for trespassing, he sleeps in the woods and walks at night. Jack isn't just disconnected from other people; he's deeply in tune with the Earth's rhythms, noting them in journals; "it wasn't just about staying unseen; it was a way to immerse himself in a world that most people didn't know existed." Kitty and Howard, married transplants, don't know much about Lodeshill when they retire there to fulfill Kitty's dream of country living. An aspiring painter, she immerses herself in local customs and history while her husband struggles to find his place in the village and in his marriage. Jamie, a young man who grew up in Lodeshill dreaming of a life on its farms, works robotically at a warehouse job, putting his passion into customizing his car. The impending sale of a farm with significance for both Jack and Jamie casts a shadow over the plot's slow burn. Jamie's grandfather, a former prisoner of war, captures the reader's interest but is unfortunately one of many minor characters competing for attention. This elegant novel's true subject is its evolving pastoral setting, which is richer than its tableau of underdeveloped characters.
