Melissa Harrison’s bestselling 2018 novel All Among the Barley, set in the early 1930s, was much concerned with the pace of change in the countryside. The interfering outsider Constance FitzAllen passionately advocated for tradition, while worn-down farmers welcomed any innovation that would ease their punishing workload. Almost a century later, in another fictional English village, change can be neither debated nor resisted.

While Barley was narrated by an elderly woman looking back at her rural childhood, The Given World portrays a whole community, granting a chapter each to significant characters over six months, with birds, blossom and crops forming a restless backdrop. On the hill overlooking Lower Eodham lives Clare Grey in one of its oldest buildings: ‘What was once the priory’s refectory has been divided into a kitchen and a dining room, and its chapel with a small rose window is a library.’ She has just been to see Dr Subramanian and is digesting his news.

The doctor and his wife Saira, together with Saj the postman, represent one marker of change in a village mentioned in Domesday, the current landowner, Piers Beaumont, being a descendant of Guillaume de Belmont. At the other end of the social scale is Alan Jope, descended from one Wilfrid Joppe, living in the 11th century. Developers are moving in, new homes are planned and the ‘given world’ is taken for granted. The animals, however, are moving out. A badger, ‘the last of the clan that have made the wood their home for centuries’, shuffles off, ‘grey rump bouncing like a departing burglar captured on CCTV’. The cuckoo is heard for the last time. Even the local gods seem to be making their exit.

Echoes of Barley resound; witch marks decorate old beams and the folklorist and nature writer Miss Cleverley is a fond memory, quite unlike the unscrupulous Constance. The barley is clinging on, now sprayed with ‘three fungicides, two doses of Chlormequat and Moddus and a follow-up with Terpal’. Piers, prompted by government grants, has reinstated hedgerows. The revered Treasure Oak was ‘a jay-buried acorn, cupless and dented, when the first villager sickened from a blackening bubo’, and its antecedents helped build Piers’s now graceful home.

Many chapters begin with a nature sketch, Harrison’s forte, accompanied by signs of impending doom: rain-battered flowers that ‘won’t stand up again this year’; a roe deer kid born blind; owls and their owlets that won’t see another spring. Less successful is some of the characterisation. Hilda, an elderly actress, tumbles into a hollow, unable to get out. Her paragraphs are an odd mix of free indirect speech and authorial interpolation: ‘Enough to drive a person perfectly doolally… God bless all their souls… uncultivatable declivity.’

The nearest thing to a villain is Subramanian’s arrogant predecessor, Hugh, who dissolves not quite believably into tears when confronted with his wife’s poems. In contrast, the blunt speech and straying  thoughts of working men are well conveyed. The novel is a standalone, but forms a melancholy and satisfying complement to its acclaimed predecessor.