The Given World
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The Given World
Pre-order Now for £27.99
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Melissa Harrison
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
April brings spring surging with it, giving rise, among many in the village, to a comforting illusion that all is somehow still right with the world, and that nothing will ever change.
In the ancient Welm Valley, something is shifting: the river is behaving oddly, while the arrival of spring, with its familiar rhythms, is shadowed by an undercurrent of unease.
A woman falls while out walking and hopes to be found before nightfall; a builder experiences sudden, overwhelming vertigo on a farmhouse roof; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast, strange dream. And alone in the converted priory, overlooking watermeadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives devastating news which will force her to reconsider her family’s past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.
© Melissa Harrison 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
Critic reviews
A novel that reminds us with every luminous sentence about the fragile grace of ordinary lives. I can’t think of a writer better at evoking the English countryside in all of its strange beauty. (Evie Wyld)
A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I’ve read this year. Extraordinary. (Francis Spufford)
I loved the way The Given World is at once warm and clever, meticulously attentive to place, plants and animals while insisting on human grace. Melissa Harrison’s prose is strong and lovely as ever. (Sarah Moss)
A wonderful reading experience ... It is careful and full of care and I loved learning the rhythms and concerns of the characters and understanding their connections. It's an authentic and deeply observed multiperspective portrait of a village. An Under Milk Wood for the twenty-first century. It's just so fucking good. (Amy Liptrot)
The Given World is a superb and timely novel, lit and linked by people, place and time. It sings with symbolism and beautifully reflects the frightening and uncanny transitions of our time – natural, personal, national, historical – through the microcosm of a village and landscape that comes to life spectacularly through Harrison’s brilliant mastery of description and detail. Spirited, spirit-filled, strange, resonant, heartbreaking and poignant, The Given World rings through the reader like a struck bell. (Rob Cowen)
A truly groundbreaking novel, setting the day-to-day rhythms of rural life against troubling and sinister shifts in nature's calendar. Melissa Harrison's forensic portrayal of the village and its residents - wild and human, old and new - deserves a place at the very heart of the English post-pastoral canon. (Stephen Moss)
Precious few writers can set a story in nature convincingly and nobody does it better than Melissa Harrison. A tale of honest rural intensity that grips and surprises. (Tristan Gooley)
Melissa Harrison doesn't just write the English countryside, she decocts, extracts, distills and blends its essences into fiction so real-world adjacent it haunts. The Given World is a masterful portrait of our time and place, which like the unquestionably animate river running through it, will not be contained. (Amy-Jane Beer)
The Given World is a dark pastoral, deliciously laced with a hint of the supernatural. Through her nuanced characters, Melissa Harrison draws our attention to shifting political currents and contrasting ideologies. I’m full of gratitude for her gifts – she is a deeply sensitive and empathetic writer, even-handed about both rural and urban lives. That’s not something to be taken for granted in these polarising times. (Jini Reddy)
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