I could have picked any Hardy but this is wonderful. He is so good at portraying the highs and lows of human emotions and endeavours and setting them against the vast background of time and space that puts the smallness of the human condition into perspective

What I love about Hardy is that anybody of any age can get into his books because he's such a good writer. All you've got to do is start reading. I could have picked any of his books but this is my favourite

It's the most tragic tale of a man who did a great wrong (he sells his wife and daughter) and pays for it later. The way Henchard arranges his life just so, only to see it wrecked and ruined by Fate - it makes me howl with pathos

You have to hand it to Thomas Hardy. He knew how to come up with the blackest, most fascinating of characters (principally, corn merchant and mayor Michael Henchard), then put them in a cracking predicament

A truly wonderful book

And then there is the development of Henchard himself, the figure in this crowded landscape, a man for whom we should not have sympathy, but one whom Hardy has painted in such a masterfully subtle way that in the end our heart breaks with his - despite his past sins

Savagely elegant… If Thomas Hardy had ventured to historic Cumberland, this is the tenor of the tale that he would have written… Bragg writes with cinematic poetry: in empathetic close-up to her few characters, in wide-angled landscape illumination of the fell­scapes that both liberate and contain them. The world that she conjures so deftly is a world away from the visitors’ Lake District… Sometimes in clipped sentences like gasped breath, sometimes by unfurling parables of light over landscapes, Bragg recreates an extra­ordinary, often disregarded world, uniting farm and fell, work and prayer, suffering and redemption in new and powerful ways

This is a book which stayed with me well after I finished it… A very thoughtful book with plenty to mull over

A closely observed rural family chronicle, a fierce indictment of the ignorant authoritarianism of government agencies in recent decades promoting untried, environmentally disastrous and lethally poisonous pesticides in the countryside, and an understated but strong celebration of spiritual discovery and resilience