Harvest

‘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