Lewis Pike is the last of a dying breed. His family have lived in the same village for generations, nestled in a valley in the heart of the Wessex downlands. But that village is barely recognizable from the one his grand-father knew. Lewis is the only teenager left, steadfastly refusing to move to the town. His ever-deepening alienation and loneliness are relieved when he is seduced by an older woman, Mary, the wife of an eccentric poet. Interwoven with Lewis’ story is the romance between his own grandparents, Jack and Rose, over the course of that ‘last summer’ of 1939, in the same village.
A novel about adolescence and first love, English nature and the profound changes affecting the rural landscape, The Harvest is a contemporary and unsentimental elegy for an entire class and way of life that is disappearing as surely as the English elm. Lewis for all his brutality and strangeness, is a part of that landscape. The new world that is replacing him no longer understands nature’s dark promise: that at the heart of life is sacrifice.