At Hawthorn Time - Hardcover

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)

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 (Kate Saunders The Times)

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 Observer )

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 (Holly Williams Independent on Sunday)

The landscape, indeed, feels like the most vivid character of all . Harrison has a detailed, lyrical, surprising eye . It requires a reader who is prepared to slow down to absorb the beauty, the detail, and stop demanding answers (Lucy Atkins Sunday Times)

Acute, effortless . So much unforced life is here that Harrison is readily comparable with Elizabeth Taylor and Penelope Lively; but she has a distinction all her own - and her growing audience must hope to live long enough to read everything she writes (Spectator)

A nature novelist in the great tradition of Thomas Hardy and J L Carr . Bracing and arresting ***** (Sunday Telegraph)

A heartbreaking exploration of love and loss (Viv Groskop Red)