The novel is narrated by Edie Mather, a fourteen-year-old girl who lives at Wych Farm with her parents, George and Ada Mather. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. Yes, the 1930s setting was a big part of the draw for for me – that and Melissa Harrison’s writing which is just so evocative and beautifully judged.

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. The countryside is idyllic, the work is hard and unrelenting and there's a hint of menace, something not quite right, lurking just under the surface: fascism and anti-semitism are beginning to show their ugly heads, misogyny and male violence are in evidence and possibly there are mental health issues.Even the farmers amongst us did not warm to either the characters or the storyline - the characters being one dimensional and the storyline uninspiring. The difficulty for me lies in this being a slow and at times a dull story as I waited for an event to happen. 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.

I loved dogs and wasn’t able to have one of my own, so they were mine for a short while, by virtue of me being a guest. The angle which seems to have been given the greatest (and compared to its treatment in the book disproportionate) coverage in press reviews and interviews, is an examination of 1930s rural themed fascism (my term). However she is also a successful novelist – her second novel “In the Hawthorn Time” being shortlisted for the Costa Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize – and I had seen this book as an outsider for the Booker longlist (in fact given the theme that the judges seemed to pick out across their books I am perhaps surprised at its exclusion). For her, it is the present that matters and she chronicles it as Connie claims to seek to do, in all its tiny particulars.

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. Also living at the estate to help with the farm work are Edie’s brother, Frank, their paternal grandfather and two farmhands, John and Doble. I had expected ducks or moorhens to explode from the margins, as they would have had I gone into the pond by the house, but it seemed that no wildfowl made this pond their home.

They had four fields at the bottom of the garden, one leading onto the next like a patchwork quilt, in shades of green and gold through the seasons. Powerful and subtle and richly detailed , this is a book that inhabits its territory, knows its people, and follows its own haunting logic. As an evocation of place and a lost way of life, Harrison’s novel is astonishing, as potent and irresistible as a magic spell.

Plus, if you need any more persuading about the quality of this novel, I can point you in the direction of Max’s reading highlights for 2020 where it features prominently – there’s a link here.