At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison

Here's where it all ends: a long, straight road between fields. Four-thirty on a May morning: the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere below the treeline in the east. 

This is how Melissa Harrison's Costa Shortlisted novel At Hawthorn Time opens; from there the story moves back to the month before, as Spring comes to the countryside around the village of Lodeshill, and four people set out on courses which lead to this moment early one May morning.

I loved At Hawthorn Time when I first read it last year, and revisiting it before paperback publication I felt just the same.


Here's the full review - At Hawthorn Time -  and my summing up from it
 "At Hawthorn Time is a lovely, compelling read. While it doesn't share the brutality of Cynan Jones' The Dig, it has the same quality of depicting rural life intimately and seeing it clearly, without blinkers; of showing that it's not glossy and chocolate box pretty but a place of dirt, and that without it being a place of work it will become empty and sterile. 
There's also a little touch of the thriller about it. As the story brings us closer to discovering who was involved in the accident and why, it will have you turning the pages faster or wanting to sneakily check the ending - I'm not sure I'd advise it as, like the motorist whizzing along a country lane, you'll miss so much in the details."

Maryom's review - 5 stars 
Publisher - Bloomsbury Publishing 
Genre - adult literary fiction