The autumn of 1933 is the most beautiful Edie Mather has ever known. But in the fields and villages surrounding Wych Farm, the Great War still lingers—a shadow over a community struggling through economic hardship and the threat of change. At fourteen, Edie is on the cusp of adulthood, feeling the pull of a world that won’t wait for her to catch up.

Then Constance FitzAllen arrives. A glamorous outsider from London, she claims to be preserving the old ways, documenting the fading traditions of rural life. She urges the villagers to resist progress, to return to what was. But not everyone trusts her motives. As the harvest draws near and Wych Farm’s future hangs in the balance, Edie must learn to trust herself—before it's too late.

I really enjoyed this. As a country boy – though not a farmer, I lived on and near farmland – Harrison’s depiction of Edie’s fascination and affinity with the natural wonders around her brought back the scents and sounds of my own childhood. 

Trying to establish a sense of your own identity in a small community where everyone knows you by sight, but you don’t feel entirely a part of it, can be a struggle, and Harrison captures this conundrum perfectly.  Edie’s growing belief in the truth of her own being, stirred up by the arrival of Connie, is convincing and heartbreaking.

 It's not a plotty book, though it is filled with incident and consequences.  This suited me just fine, but I have seen it cited as a negative is some reader reviews.

All Among the Barley is a perfectly paced, subtle, depiction of a few important months in a young girl’s life, ones which come to shape her fate.  Harrison’s prose is glorious, and shimmers with small movements just below the surface, like mice in a cornfield, revealing inconspicuous whiskers of backstory and motivation, leaving the reader some of their own harvesting work to do.