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At Hawthorn Time
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Description
It is dawn on a May morning. On a long straight road between two sleeping fields a car slows as it arrives at the scene of an accident.
Howard and Kitty have been married for thirty years and now sleep in different rooms. They do not discuss it. It was always Kitty's dream to move from their corner of north London into the countryside, and when the kids were gone they moved to the village of Lodeshill. Howard often wonders if anyone who lives in this place has a reason to be there.
Jack was once a rural rebel, a protestor who only ever wanted the freedom to walk alone in his own country. Having finished another stint in prison for trespassing, he sets off once more, walking north with his old battered backpack.
Jamie is a nineteen-year-old Lodeshill boy who works in a distribution center and has a Saturday job at the bakery. He spent his childhood exploring the land with his grandfather and playing with Alex who lived in the farmhouse next-door.
As the lives of these people overlap, we realize that mysterious layers of history are not only buried within them, but also locked into the landscape. A captivating novel, At Hawthorn Time is about identity, consumerism, changing boundaries and our own long, straight path into the unknown.
Product details
| Published | 07 Jul 2015 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 9781632860002 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury USA |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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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
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At Hawthorn Time is intensely moving, a book overshadowed by disaster but still careful, precise, and hypnotically beautiful.
Evie Wyld, author of ALL THE BIRDS, SINGING
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This elegant novel's true subject is its evolving pastoral setting.
Kirkus Reviews
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Splendid, closely observed . . . acute, effortless . . . [Harrison's] growing audience must hope to live long enough to read everything she writes.
The Spectator (UK)
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Harrison's love of the natural world and its traditions vibrates poetically through every page . . . [Her] 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.
The Times (UK)
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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.
Independent on Sunday (UK)

























