I’m hoping this piece will qualify for Karen and Lizzy’s Reading Independent Publishers Month, which you can read about here. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that the material is credited and referenced to JacquiWine’s Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Even the farmers amongst us did not warm to either the characters or the storyline - the characters being one dimensional and the storyline uninspiring. In short, Miss FitzAllen harbours anti-Semitic views, beliefs that play a key role in the novel’s dramatic denouement. He had been a schoolmaster in Suffolk but became fascinated by recollections by country folk of the old days, what life was like before the 1914-1918 war.

We guess that there will be more to this young woman than meets the eye and that her friendship with 14-year-old Edie is likely ultimately to blow up in some dramatic way.

While Connie tries to idealise a rural England of bread-making, cheerful peasants and pastoral idealism, real farmers like the narrator’s father are struggling with absentee landlords, debts and confusion over whether they want government subsidies and import tariffs, or free trade. When the dark water was at my shoulders I stopped and pushed my palely billowing nightdress down into the water, and waited for the ripples to subside. This feels like a straightforward read but the more I think about it, the cleverer it is at making literary capital out of various and sometimes contradictory relationships between present and past. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Constance’s presence awakens something in Edie – a feeling that she is being seen in a new light.

Well, I’m no anti-Semite, of course, but they’re not from here, and if we’re not careful they’ll mar the character of England forever – not to mention the way they undercut wages and take work away from ordinary people, just as the Irish did.It is this world that Melissa Harrison sets All Among the Barley, though at a slightly later period, the 1930s. And the key part of the book for me was the portrayal of the rural community as explained earlier in my comments – at a time of great change. There is a lyricism in Harrison’s descriptions of the environment which manages to be both detailed and evocative.

And because Edie cares little for politics or the world beyond her village, the dark underbelly of the novel is underplayed. We and Edie also see more the tensions in the small farm community – her father’s struggle with despondency and alcohol, her mother’s odd relationship with John whose political differences with her father become increasingly open as the tensions between tradition and progress become greater. I recoiled from it at first and wished that it might have wrapped up differently or at least, at a more measured pace.And though one might say that its merits in theory were never achieved in practice, few would argue that someone with sincerely-held Marxist views would be likely to approve of, say, Stalin’s policy of genocide against the Ukrainian people which also occurred in the 1930s. There were cows with slimey noses and the longest tongues that scared me when they reached around my fingers for a handful of grass. Although the book is set in rural England I felt this was a microcosm of what was happening all over the country at this time and is indeed is relevant today.

I have been looking forward to reading this one since seeing the initial reviews last year, but for various reasons it has only just reached the top of the to read list. For a novel so gentle and with plots and sub-plots which build slowly, it comes as a real and sudden punch in the gut. The central character and narrator is Edith Mather, a 14 year-old farm girl in East Anglia who has just completed her formal schooling and ought to embarking on a life as a nanny or even a teacher. As the narrative progresses, we begin to realise – even if Edie remains blind to it – that Constance’s interest in the traditions of English life extends to holding prejudices against outsiders.She lives at Wych Farm, near the village of Elmbourne, with her mother and father, her brother Frank, and two farm workers, the aged Doble and the horseman John, who had served in the war and experienced things that he does not wish to remember. The water was chill at first, but by the time it was around my thighs it felt blood-warm; the pond might have been shady, but the weather had been hot for weeks. The book is written in the first person by Edith Mather –looking back, many decades later, on events from the Summer and Autumn of 1934, when she was 14.