“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

“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

“This elegant novel's true subject is its evolving pastoral setting.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Splendid, closely observed . . . acute, effortless . . . [Harrison's] growing audience must hope to live long enough to read everything she writes.” —The Spectator (UK)

“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)

“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)

“If Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald were to co-author a book with John Burnside and Adam Foulds, it might end up something like At Hawthorn Time.” —Financial Times

“At Hawthorn Time shows off a bracing talent in the tradition of Thomas Hardy, JL Carr and Henry Williamson.” —Daily Telegraph (UK)

“Bracing and arresting.” —The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“Thomas Hardy, were he around today, would no doubt approve: a determinedly contemporary pastoral tragedy, written with a keen sense of the natural world. Harrison has a lyrical turn of phrase.” —The Daily Mail (UK)

“[Harrison's] level gaze, crisp prose and sharp insight make her a fresh and valuable voice in both fiction and nature writing.” —The Guardian (UK)

“Our changing countryside--both the place and the people in it--is wonderfully explored.” —Harper's Bazaar

“In part an elegy for our dwindling connection with nature . . . Harrison strips away our idealized pastoral vision to unveil the real countryside, lamenting its many losses yet also encouraging us to discover and celebrate the beauty that remains.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Brings to the forefront the extremely personal and private ways that we can live as individuals while simultaneously highlighting the impermanence of that individualism. Combined with graceful and delicate language about nature and the English countryside--which could in many ways be called a fifth, unnamed and ever-present character in the novel--At Hawthorn Time is a quiet meditation on the unexpected beauty of both the individual and the community, and the changing landscape in which the two exist.” —ShelfAwareness

"This is an account of rural life, but a realistic one, a novel of our modern countryside of incomers and misfits, with a terrific ending, built into the start, which snaps shut like a gin trap at the finish. A gripping story which lingers in the mind." —The Independent