Harvest Georgina Harding (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📖

thought of the house burning. She looked down and there was only Siberia, vast and bare, and the shining wing of the plane. She saw the house on fire down there, flames leaping from old long-dry timber, beams, floors, furniture, the flames so bright and the smoke so thick that it could not fail to be seen, however high the plane flew. And she saw the three of them, tiny smoke-blackened figures running out from the flames. Like the figures in the photos Jonathan once showed her. It suddenly seemed like arson, what she had done.

Acknowledgements

So many thanks, on this book and always, to a constantly wonderful team of editor and agent, Alexandra Pringle and Victoria Hobbs, for their thoughtfulness and faith in my work. Also to the rest at Bloomsbury, to Mary Tomlinson, and Jessica Sinyor at A M Heath. And to the farmers, David and Nell.

A Note on the Author

Georgina Harding is the author of five previous novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, a BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for an Encore Award, Painter of Silence, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012; and, most recently, The Gun Room and Land of the Living. Georgina Harding lives most of the time on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.

Also available by Georgina Harding

Land of the Living

‘Perfect – a flawless gem of a novel from start to finish … Wonderful, strange and wise’ Patrick McGrath

Charlie’s experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Nagaland 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. Though hidden even to himself, the darkest secrets of Charlie’s adventures in the strange and shadowy ridges of the Nagaland mountains, his dream-like encounters with the mysterious and ancient tribesmen, leak and bleed through his consciousness. What should be said and what left unsaid? Is it possible to forge a new life in the wake of unfathomable horror?

‘Audacious and moving … Elegiac, often elliptical vignettes that immaculately simulate Charlie’s shame, regret and grief … Masterly’ Sunday Times

‘Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense … A masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the idea of home and the limits of love’ Guardian

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/land-of-the-living-9781408896266/

The Gun Room

The memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else.

Dawn, mist clearing over rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young photographer takes 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 Jonathan has seen in that village is more than he can bear…

He flees to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, and to take different kinds of pictures: of streets and crowds and cherry blossom – and of a girl with whom he is no longer lost. Yet even here his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and to other events buried deep in his past.

‘Georgina Harding’s novel is 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, Guardian

‘Quietly and restrainedly, The Gun Room is a book that provokes searching questions’ Daily Mail

‘Graceful and considered … The dreamlike quality is heightened by Harding’s sharply observed prose … As befits a writer adept at carefully cropped scenes, Harding has the measure of photography. The novel plays with its ability to captivate, shock, inform and misdirect’ Sunday Telegraph

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/the-gun-room-9781408869826/

Painter of Silence

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012

Iasi, Romania, the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of a hospital. Deaf and mute, he is unable to communicate until a young nurse called Safta brings paper and pencils with which he can draw. Slowly, painstakingly, memories appear on the page.

The memories are Safta’s also. For the man is Augustin, son of the cook at the manor house which was Safta’s family home. Born six months apart, they grew up with a connection that bypassed words. But while Augustin’s world remained 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.

‘Conjures a tale that recalls vintage Michael Ondaatje … delicate and sweeping’ Daily Mail

‘This is fiction of the most graceful kind … a quiet storm of imagery and emotions’ Independent on Sunday

‘Harding writes with exquisite restraint … Her deceptively simple prose gives a startling beauty to the ordinary, and evokes great depth of suffering’ Guardian

http://bloomsbury.com/uk/painter-of-silence-9781408824474/

The Spy Game

On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna’s mother disappears into the fog. That same morning, a spy case breaks in the news. Obsessed by stories of espionage, Anna’s brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was an undercover spy and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort fact from fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how do you know who a person was once she is dead?

‘It is the calm quietness of her writing that is so appealing – she lays an image down so gently that it floats in the mind long after’ Margaret Forster

‘Harding skilfully weaves together history, memory and imagination in this haunting and beautifully written novel about how, chameleon-like, we construct our