There is an expression about saving the best till last; this is exactly what Jim Crace did when he penned his final novel, Harvest. Even before he had finished writing the novel, Crace announced that it would be his final one. He stuck doggedly to this intention until 2018, when he wrote Melody after an appreciable gap of five years.
Harvest tells the story of a quiet and remote English village in the sixteen hundreds, when progress is beginning to destroy the traditions of village life. When the novel begins, the Inclosure Act has just been introduced and passed into law. This empowered the enclosure of open fields and common lands in England and Wales by wealthy landowners who could then decide what they wanted to do with the land. Ultimately, this became a positive Act, because it led to the Agricultural Revolution, but at the beginning the Act was designed to be abused - and it was. Landlords like Master Jordan, the antagonist of the novel, were able to devote their fields and lands to livestock, specifically sheep, so that they made more money, but they also prevented villagers from growing food, or having access to any leftover yield from the harvest. People went hungry and ultimately left the village in droves.
The sixteen hundreds also saw a fear of witchcraft take hold. Previously pagan, English villages became vehemently anti-witch, and no woman was immune from accusation. Punishment was swift and brutal - women believed to have been witches were burned at the stake. Women suspected of being witches were thrown into the river, to see if they floated. If a woman floated then she was confirmed to be a witch. If she drowned, she was free of all suspicion although of course, she was also dead. The seventeenth century was a difficult time to be a woman.
As the story of a week-long period of time in a changing village in England, Harvest shows how an incoming landowner with nefarious intentions was able to force a mass exodus of people from the village by using fear tactics and violence. The book is violent - there are three murders, a knife attack and an accidental death in the pillories - and it is also a glimpse into the hardships faced by rural people at the time. Known for the accuracy of his historical novels, Crace received the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Harvest and the novel was nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.
