Harvest

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Harvest by Georgina Harding, read by Antonia Beamish.

‘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

So fresh and free she looked, in the yellow dress. Sunlight to blaze away the shadows.

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.

In a compelling addition to Harding’s cycle of acclaimed novels on themes of witness, memory and silence, on what goes unsaid long after wars are over, Harvest tells how a family reaps the consequences of its past.

‘Taut and unsettling ... A fine meditation on war’s long reach’ Mail on Sunday

Critics Review

Luminescent … Organic and vital … Remarkable … Harvest is a work of delicate, devastating beauty, proof that Harding is a writer of rare insight who deserves to be read more widely
Financial Times
Harding’s cycle of books stand as a masterly achievement, illuminating with wisdom and compassion the darkest corners of the human heart
Guardian
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
The Times
Harding moves fluently between each character … The payoff is devastating
Daily Mail
So deeply engaging, so threatening, so mild, so controlled — at every stage it seems as if desperate damage is about to be done, and then bit by excruciating bit you realise it was done long, long ago, and nobody you’re looking at now can do anything about it. What a writer!
Louisa Young, author of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You
Harvest is an old-fashioned novel in the best possible sense ... The rewards are many. The heartbeat of the book continues to echo long after the last page has been turned’
Times Literary Supplement
Taut and unsettling, this fine meditation on war’s long reach follows on from Land Of The Living but more than satisfies as a stand-alone
Mail on Sunday
An absolutely exceptional novel … She has a deeply humane and developed sense of what it means to be a woman, and also what it means to belong
Clover Stroud
Staggering … An unparalleled masterpiece
Lunate.co.uk
Praise for Land of the Living: 'Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense ... A masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the idea of home and the limits of love
Guardian
Georgina Harding’s beautiful novels tell of wars, and troubled homecomings as traumatised fighting men try to re-enter interrupted marriages and homes grown strange ... Land of the Living is as wise and haunting as its predecessors
New Statesman, Books of the Year
A quietly powerful novel
Observer
Audacious and moving … Masterly
Sunday Times
Remarkable and rare
Daily Mail
Tremendously imaginative, really compassionate … Manages to make them almost tangibly real, really immersive
BBC Radio 4 Open Book
Written with an admirable precision, and the dark of the narrative has to be teased out … It is a novel of ideas, for it invites you to think of questions of responsibility, exploitation, cruelty, brutality ... One of those rare novels which has you thinking, when you reach the end, that there is much you have passed over which demands a second reading to be fully felt and understood
Scotsman

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