S itting stoned on a hill above his village, a young man muses on his place in the world. Connor is proud to have fenced pastures while his mates have been away at university. But it’s overwhelming to think of all their lives being equally real and urgent. Are they part of the same story or separate ones? A phrase comes to him from a book he hated at school: something about “the roar on the other side of silence”. In this fine, subtle and strange novel from one of the most probing writers of contemporary rural life, Melissa Harrison earns that nod to George Eliot, whose words she gives to an anxious and ecstatic labourer clutching a can of Fanta. The Given World follows the inhabitants of one village in a river valley, a place “as old as anywhere”, for six months between the equinoxes of a year. The time is now, or an imminent future when the seasons seem to have “ceased their metronome”.…