Melissa Harrison - The Given World

About

The Bookery is delighted to welcome award winning novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison for an evening celebrating the publication of her new novel, The Given World , chaired byDr Michael Warren

Luminous and intimate, The Given World is a powerful and contemporary story of belonging, loss and the richly interwoven connections between people, history and place. Set in the ancient Welm Valley, the novel unfolds in spring, when familiar rural rhythms give rise to a comforting illusion that nothing will ever change. Yet beneath the surface, something is shifting: the river behaves oddly, villagers across the community experience the same vast and unsettling dream, and private moments of crisis hint at deeper fault lines. At the heart of the story is Clare Grey, living alone in a converted priory overlooking centuries old water meadows, whose receipt of devastating news forces her to re-examine her familys past and the weight of her own solitude.
Blending acute social observation with an intense attentiveness to landscape, plants and animals, The Given World has been widely praised for its depth, sensitivity and insight.

Sarah Mossdescribes the novel as at once warm and clever, meticulously attentive to place, plants and animals while insisting on human grace.
Francis Spufford calls it a brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now extraordinary,
Amy Jane Beerwrites that Melissa Harrison extracts, distils and blends the essences of the countryside into fiction so real world adjacent it haunts.
Tristan Gooleynotes that precious few writers can set a story in nature convincingly and nobody does it better than Melissa Harrison.

Melissa Harrison is a novelist, nature writer, podcaster and childrens author. Her 2018 novel All Among the Barley won the UK European Prize for Literature. Her work has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize and longlisted for the Womens Prize for Fiction. She lives in Suffolk and is widely admired for fiction that captures the natural world with rare intimacy, intelligence and emotional force.
Dr Michael J. Warren is a writer, medievalist and naturalist. He teaches English in Chelmsford and is a trustee of Curlew Action. He published the Cuckoos Lea: The Forgotten History of Birds and Place with Bloomsbury in 2025. He curates The Birds and Place Project, a website collecting all bird related English place names, and has been a leading voice in the New Networks for Nature movement.

This event is part of The Bookerys wider programme celebrating reading, creativity and community during theNational Year of Reading 2026. The evening will include an audience Q&A, followed by Melissa signing copies of The Given World.