The coming of age drama at the centre of the novel was quite sensitively handled but it was underscored by the secondary theme of witchcraft. The characters meanwhile have their own more immediate issues creating so much strain that things seem set to boil over. The last several chapters of the book, in which the reader is comfortable with the smallish cast of characters, are great.

Whether I am permitted to or not, I love the world which Melissa Harrison evokes, for all its inevitable shortcomings. In warning against right-wing excesses and the importance of accepting change, Melissa Harrison is potentially at risk of tripping up against her own self-evident love of the timeless English countryside and its long-held traditions. There are perhaps too many themes struggling for deeper treatment in this book: the clash between Edie’s bright intelligence and her family’s need for her on the struggling farm, the oppressive sexual relationship she falls into with a neighbour which raises issues of abuse/non-consent and sexual complicity, the vein of ‘madness’ that emerges and its treatment in the 1930s. For her, it is the present that matters and she chronicles it as Connie claims to seek to do, in all its tiny particulars. 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’ve never heard of Melissa Harrison and something about this tale reminded me of the writing of Elizabeth Berridge and I thought they might be contemporaries.

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.

Edie struggles with her conflicting reactions to the close, sexual attentions paid to her by a slightly older boy – Alfie. In short, Miss FitzAllen harbours anti-Semitic views, beliefs that play a key role in the novel’s dramatic denouement. Harrison describes it in lush detail that makes you feel you are there, not just the flora and fauna as she sees it, but how it changes with the seasons, or even as day turns to night. I felt as though she perceived me more clearly than my family did, for they all took me for granted, whereas she seemed curious about who I was and what I thought.

The novel’s epilogue is very affecting, a section in which seventy-year-old Edie contemplates her current situation – a life marked by events that took place during Constance’s visit. The glory of the farm then, just before harvest: acres of gold like bullion, strewn with the sapphires of cornflowers and the garnets of corn poppies and watched over from on high by larks. But in this idyllic setting there are darker dramas afoot, a hint that one war has past leaving its scars on people, while we are aware of another just around the corner. It sounds like Edie and Constance are marvelous characters to read about, though the latter’s opinions must be rather jarring to read these days. All Among the Barley comes to an abrupt and shocking denouement, at least as brutal as Tarka’s slaughter by hounds, but it is the village of Elmbourne, the meadows and lanes that Edie loves so fiercely, that linger in the memory.In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes.

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. In fact, it could be seen as a political novel disguised as a coming-of-age story, albeit it in a very nuanced way! The ending comes with sad surprise, at least partly because it is so surprising that human spirit is caught in the maw of forces greater than itself.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The rhythms and rituals of farming are also beautifully portrayed, augmenting the novel’s captivating sense of time and place. Edie observes these signs but does not always understand what they mean, just as she does not understand the lurking shadows of war, either the one that has passed or the one that threatens the future. Hard work and a simplicity of life and the limited scale of opportunities available to most individuals at that time. She is also interested in superstitions – witch marks, curses, forms of protection and the like – drawing on an active imagination fuelled by folklore.