I was lucky enough to be sent a proof of Melissa Harrison’s new novel The Given World. I finished it last night. My word, what an extraordinary book. It is lots of things, but one of them – brilliantly, audaciously – is Kipling’s ‘Dymchurch Flit’ reimagined for a contemporary England in ecological crisis. One character even wanders in from its pages. Or, more accurately, abides and persists with the land.

The narrative winds through the lives of a dozen or so inhabitants of a village, buried deep in a valley, over the course of six months, spring to autumn.

The river, and the landscape it feeds, is suffering. The crisis is spiritual as much as ecological, I think. Although perhaps spiritual is the wrong word. It’s not a book about faith so much as being, about affinities of place and duties of care, about – I think – acceptance as also being a kind of resistence. The principal narrative arc is the way one character deals with her newly impending mortality; it is interleaved with long-running disputes about belonging, ownership, possession and dispossession. Not for nothing does it begin with a fictional quote from the Domesday Book. It’s leavened with a deep sense of the English past, its legends and beliefs as much as its history. (I’m pretty sure at least one other character has stepped out of folklore; no doubt there are other references I missed!)

I’m tempted to call it magical. It is magical. But not in a whimsical sense: it has a profound and luminous sense of the living world, all that’s given to us new each spring. I remember Dennis Potter being interviewed shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer. He spoke about how bright the blossom shone for him during his last spring. The Given World has that quality of intensity in its perception. The descriptions glow in something greater than sunlight. Its magic is the kind of depth that Sylvia Townsend Warner so lightly conjures, a connectedness to deep-rooted unseen things.

It’s also a book that explores how we think about the English countryside – the indigenes and the incomers alike, whether the latter are second-homers from the city or other kinds of migrants. (I’m aware this précis thus far could make it sound somewhat Little Englandish. The Given World couldn’t be a more different kind of book.) But if the core theme is what is being lost, there is also hope that renewal can spring out of crisis and death. Rivers, like histories, are persistent, powerful things: they cannot easily be suppressed. The book’s closing pages are profoundly, painfully beautiful.