Set in rural East Anglia in 1933 the book invites us into the daily lives of 14 year old Edie and her family who live at and work Wych Farm.

Among The Barley delivered all I could wish for and tweaked my own memories of spending time growing up on ‘Manor Farm’ as a child. Whether I am permitted to or not, I love the world which Melissa Harrison evokes, for all its inevitable shortcomings.No spoilers, but it casts the remainder of the book in a somewhat different light, illuminating the tragic consequences of the visitor’s beliefs and actions. Wi

The political upheaval between the wars was another thread - but again it seemed a narrative contrivance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Constance’s presence awakens something in Edie – a feeling that she is being seen in a new light.

Not every reader will enjoy All Along the Barley, but for those of us who are fascinated by the much slower pace of life of country people who lived much closer to natural realities, this is a very moving read. It takes a while for Constance to show her true colours, but the hints are dotted here and there throughout . There are many areas of sadness in this book from the harsh words of Edie's father to the death of Edmund the corncrake but maybe the saddest of all was the incarceration of Edie into the mental institute, abandoned by her family. The rhythms and rituals of farming are also beautifully portrayed, augmenting the novel’s captivating sense of time and place. As few of the characters are clearly drawn I struggled to become involved although a number of hints indicating dramatic change or that people were not as they seemed kept me reading.

her central character Edie, many decades later, looks forward to ending her days going back to where she had spent her formative years, presumably hoping to find it as she left it. I always have a soft spot for books with maps in them, and we get two beautiful maps at the start, one of the village and a larger scale one of the farm.Evans had introduced me to the Society of Horsemen, a sort of combination of freemasonry and horse whispering that initiated ploughmen into the craft of controlling their horses. Even the farmers amongst us did not warm to either the characters or the storyline - the characters being one dimensional and the storyline uninspiring. Harrison drawing on her nature writing beautifully captures the rhythms of rural life – both the natural rhythm of flora and fauna, as well as the rhythms that man has imposed on the landscape to make a marginal living from it.

She notices a grey sky “stitched with wavering skeins of geese”, the “green beards” of the barley that give a field “a soft nap, like dog’s fur”, the “wet-glass squeak” of hunting bats.

Workers rights, women’s rights, political tensions, anti-semitism, historical customs and traditions as well as the introduction of modern working practices and mechanisation are all introduced and thread into the story.