Harvest

Returning from Kenya to the England of the early 1950s, Philippa Moran finds herself, at 24, joining a group of university students on a summer harvest camp. In the autumn she will resume her medical studies, abandoned for the three years she has spent abroad, years which have allowed her to witness and experience - via the atrocities of the Mau Mau - the nature of political and personal violence. Westall's powerful, tautly-written story moves between Philippa's memories of the past and her absorption in the harvest camp of the present, where events dramatically assume a violence of their own. With Brian Trench, the teenage undergraduate whom she first meets in the train travelling to the camp, she embarks on a relationship which for both of them is to afford an illuminating commentary on the nature of sexual longing, passion, frustration and fulfilment. Meant primarily - one assumes - for a 'young adult' readership, this is, in fact, a very adult novel, beautifully constructed and subtly written.