We are delighted to welcome Melissa Harrison to the Authors’ Club to talk about The Given World

April brings spring surging with it, giving rise, among many in the village, to a comforting illusion that all is somehow still right with the world, and that nothing will ever change.

In the ancient Welm Valley, something is shifting: the river is behaving oddly, while the arrival of spring, with its familiar rhythms, is shadowed by an undercurrent of unease.

A woman falls while out walking and hopes to be found before nightfall; a doctor realises, too late, that he has long underestimated his wife; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast and unsettling dream. And alone in a converted priory, overlooking watermeadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives news which will force her to reconsider her family’s past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.

Melissa Harrison is a novelist, nature writer, podcaster and children’s author. Her 2018 novel All Among the Barley was the UK winner of the European Prize for Literature. Her work has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She lives in Suffolk.

‘A brilliantly acute social portrait of English rural life now. The best piece of serious fiction I’ve read this year. Extraordinary … An elegy for the death of the English countryside and also a beautiful demonstration of how a piece of realist literary fiction can subtly borrow from the fantastic, weaving in threads of the mythic and the unearthly that enrich the this-worldly sense the book is making.’

Francis Spufford

A Financial Times and Observer ‘Book to look out for in 2026’.

To book please contact the booking office at bookings@nlc.org.uk or call 020 7968 0912.

The two-course lunch, followed by coffee, costs £39. It’s in the Lady Violet Room and we start with drinks at 12:30pm.  Please book early and inform the club of any dietary requirements.