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'I would compare her to writers like Helen Dunmore, Elizabeth Strout, Jon McGregor' BBC Radio 4
'Harding achieves a weighty sense of silence and things not said in this unsettling book about the aftershocks of trauma and the burdens of bearing witness' Sunday Times'A masterly achievement, illuminating with wisdom and compassion the darkest corners of the human heart' GuardianA farm in Norfolk in the 1970s. A Japanese girl comes to visit her English lover in the house where he was born. She arrives on a day of perfect summer, stands with his mother in a garden filled with roses, watches as his brother walks fields of ripening wheat.
But between the two brothers lies the shadow of their father's violent death almost twenty years before, the unresolved narrative of their childhood - a story that has gone untold, a story that began in the last war. In the presence of the girl, the old trauma begins to surface as the work of the harvest begins.
'Taut and unsettling ... A fine meditation on war's long reach' Mail on Sunday
About the author
Georgina Harding is the author of five previous novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, a BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for an Encore Award, Painter of Silence, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012; and, most recently, The Gun Room and Land of the Living. Together, The Gun Room, Land of the Living and Harvest make up the critically acclaimed Harvest Cycle. In 2021, her short story ‘Night Train’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Georgina lives most of the time on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.
Summary
'I would compare her to writers like Helen Dunmore, Elizabeth Strout, Jon McGregor' BBC Radio 4
'Harding achieves a weighty sense of silence and things not said in this unsettling book about the aftershocks of trauma and the burdens of bearing witness' Sunday Times
'A masterly achievement, illuminating with wisdom and compassion the darkest corners of the human heart' Guardian
A farm in Norfolk in the 1970s. A Japanese girl comes to visit her English lover in the house where he was born. She arrives on a day of perfect summer, stands with his mother in a garden filled with roses, watches as his brother walks fields of ripening wheat.
But between the two brothers lies the shadow of their father's violent death almost twenty years before, the unresolved narrative of their childhood - a story that has gone untold, a story that began in the last war. In the presence of the girl, the old trauma begins to surface as the work of the harvest begins.
'Taut and unsettling ... A fine meditation on war's long reach' Mail on Sunday
Foreword
A powerfully disquieting novel about family and secrets by the Orange Prize-shortlisted author of Painter of Silence
Additional text
Staggering . An unparalleled masterpiece
