Harvest

Harvest

Georgina Harding

Georgina Harding

So fresh and free she looked, in the yellow dress. Sunlight to blaze away the shadows. A farm in Norfolk in the 1970s. A Japanese girl comes to visit her English lover in the house where he was born. She arrives on a day of perfect summer, stands with his mother in a garden filled with roses, watches as his brother walks fields of ripening wheat.But between the two brothers lies the shadow of their father's violent death almost twenty years before, the unresolved narrative of their childhood – a story that has gone untold, a story that began in the last war. In the presence of the girl, the old trauma begins to surface as the work of the harvest begins.In a compelling addition to Harding's cycle of acclaimed novels on themes of witness, memory and silence, on what goes unsaid long after wars are over, Harvest tells how a family reaps the consequences of its past.
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The Gun Room

The Gun Room

Georgina Harding

Georgina Harding

The memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else. Dawn, mist clearing over the rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young war photographer gets the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what he has seen in that village is more than he can bear, and he flees.Jonathan drifts on to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, where there are different kinds of pictures to be taken: peacetime pictures of crowds and subways and cherry blossom. And pictures of a girl with whom he is no longer lost: innumerable pictures of Kumiko, on the streets and in the rain and in the heat of the summer.Yet even here in this alien city, his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and as a witness to other events buried far...
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Painter of Silence

Painter of Silence

Georgina Harding

Georgina Harding

It is the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. He is deaf and mute, but a young nurse named Safta recognizes him from the past and brings him paper and pencils so that he might draw. Gradually, memories appear on the page: the man is Augustin, the cook's son at the manor house at Poiana where Safta was the privileged daughter. Born six months apart, they had a connection that bypassed words, but while Augustin's world stayed the same size, Safta's expanded to embrace languages, society, and a fleeting love one long, hot summer. But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and nothing would remain the same.Georgina Harding's kaleidoscopic new novel will appeal to readers of Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, and Sandor Marai. It is as intense and submerging as rain, as steeped in the horrors of our recent history as it is in the intimate passions of the human heart.
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Land of the Living

Land of the Living

Georgina Harding

Georgina Harding

A profound masterpiece on war, loss and survival, rendered in prose of rhythmic precision, subtlety and exceptional sensitivity, by the Orange Prize-shortlisted author of Painter of Silence'Arresting and brutal ... the finely tuned work of a writer exceptionally at ease with her craft and a testament to the power and poetry of clean and disciplined prose' Sadie Jones, GuardianCharlie's experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Assam during the Second World War are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk and newly married to Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. Starting a family and working the land seem the best things a man can be doing. But a chasm exists between them. Memories flood Charlie's mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present. What should be said and what left...
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