Harvest

Jim Crace at the top of his game! Allegory, moral fable - a label doesn't really matter. We are taken into the English countryside, to a village with no name - just The Village - at a time which could be any time from the 15th to the 19th century. Extraordinary writing, a prose that over and over touches poetry, wonderful and evocative details, take us to this village and its story told over seven days by Walter Thirsk. A traditional end-of-harvest celebration and a centuries-old way of life, is tragically and brutally overturned. Outside
forces of power and greed arrive and with them the culture of "Profit,Progress,Enterprise". Enclosures will soon end what had been a collective style of farming: common land will be stolen from the common people; forests will be cleared and everything will
be fenced and hedged and "the sheaf" give "way to sheep". "Harvest" is about loss, displacement, dispossession. What it deals with may be set in a past we can't pin down exactly, but such inhuman practices that accompanied the forced enclosing of land, the destruction of ordinary people's lives and
the further enrichment of already rich men, are so evident today across the world, that "Harvest" speaks as much of today as it does of the past.