"Field Work’s aim is to broaden and insert nuance into our understanding of farming. Bathurst moves to live in a attached to Rise Farm, a 180-acre Welsh hill farm run by Bert and Alison Howell. ... Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her about the land. ... I thought often of ’s glorious agricultural novel All Among the Barley while reading Field Work. Partly it’s the engagement with a dying way of life. Partly it’s the fact that both books understand how important accurate and specific language is to bringing this rural existence alive on the page. Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her honestly and movingly about the land and their place within it. One passage, in which a young farmer describes night-time with her father, is among the loveliest pieces of writing I’ve read anywhere."
Bella Bathurst

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English

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