The Long Acre by Rachel Francis

Novels about English rural life are fairly common, but this is a bit special. The usual ‘rural’ novel is usually about a city dweller’s take on country life, usually about the perils of middle-class ‘incomers’ coming to terms with life beyond London. Rachel’s novel (her first) isn’t like that at all. It’s about real people who are ‘of the soil’, going back generations. Maybe its nearest similar work is Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair, particularly Cloud Howe. But that was about a very different time, and place. This is now, in England’s West Country, facing huge social and economic stresses from the decline of farming, development pressures and how farming people cope – or don’t. There’s nothing romanticised about it – maybe there could have been a bit more about the landscape and places where it was set. But it works. Buy it!