Allen & Unwin Rain book History English Paperback 128 pages

The first book to be published by Faber in association with the National Trust, on four walks in the rain in Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor.

A wonderful meditation on the English landscape in wet weather by the acclaimed novelist and nature writer, Melissa Harrison. Whenever rain falls, our countryside changes. Fields, farms, hills and hedgerows appear altered, the wildlife behaves differently, and over time the terrain itself is transformed. In Rain, Melissa Harrison explores our relationship with the weather as she follows the course of four rain showers, in four seasons, across Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor. Blending these expeditions with reading, research, memory and imagination, she reveals how rain is not just an essential element of the world around us, but a key part of our own identity too.

Melissa Harrison writes a monthly Nature Notebook column in The Times. Her debut novel Clay (2013) won the Portsmouth First Fiction Award and was chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year. Her second, At Hawthorn Time, was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award. It was one of A. S. Byatt's Summer Reads in the Observer, and a Book of the Year for 2015 in the Telegraph. She lives in south London.