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Hutchinson Heinemann wins seven-way auction for Melissa Harrison’s fourth novel
Hutchinson Heinemann has signed The Given World, the fourth novel by Melissa Harrison, the award-winning author of All Among the Barley (Bloomsbury).
Publisher Helen Conford acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Jenny Hewson at Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency in a seven-way auction. Publication is scheduled for May 2026.
“Luminous and intimate”, The Given World is described as a story of belonging, loss and the richly interwoven connections between people, history and place.
Its description reads: “In the ancient Welm Valley, something is shifting: the river is behaving oddly, while the arrival of spring, with its familiar rhythms, is shadowed by an undercurrent of unease.
“A woman falls while out walking and hopes to be found before nightfall; a builder experiences sudden, overwhelming vertigo on a farmhouse roof; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast and unsettling dream. And alone in the converted priory, overlooking water meadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives devastating news which will force her to reconsider her family’s past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.”
Harrison said: ”The seed of this story took root before the pandemic and although I had other projects on the go it stubbornly wouldn’t budge. I feel very lucky to have had Helen and Jenny’s guidance in bringing it to fruition, and I’m excited to be working with the team at Hutchinson Heinemann. I’m looking forward enormously to publication day, and having a novel out under my name once more.”
Conford said: ”I am a long-term admirer of Melissa’s fiction and am so happy to be publishing her latest novel, The Given World. It is a wonderfully observed, deeply felt novel about our relationships with each other and with the natural world. It is ambitious, too, in her exploration of how our daily life and concerns interact with, and at times obscure, the bigger, slower-moving changes all around us.”
