What a lovely read this is, so thoughtful and moving, yet also challenging and provocative too. Rural has deservedly been chosen as a LoveReading Star Book. Author Rebecca Smith looks at the history and future of those born, bred, and working in the countryside. This isn’t just a surface picture of rural life, it deep-dives into this world, and shows an element that most won’t have seen or even understand. At first I felt as though she was slightly ambivalent, sitting on a sharpened edge of awareness and I wasn’t sure where she was going to settle. The further I read, the more I realised that she holds a true love, personal and honest and pure, for the countryside. This book feels important, as though it had to be written now, and should be read by those who hold power, who make decisions. Her questions, her mourning, emphasise the reality of working in our most rural areas, this isn’t a theme-ride version, this is truth. I felt as though I was on a meandering course as I read, dipping in and out of her family, discovering history, examining the social and economic aspects of rural life. It has somehow seared itself onto my soul and I cried as I finished. Highly recommended, Rural is a very special read, one that highlights the joy and difficulties of living a working life in our countryside.
Join Rebecca Smith on the London Mountain Podcast in an insightful conversation about nature, conservation, and the human stories that connect us to the land.
Starting with Rebecca Smith’s own family history – foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal – Rural is an exploration of our green and pleasant land, and the people whose labour has shaped it.
Beautifully observed, these are the stories of professions and communities that often go overlooked. Smith shows the precarity for those whose lives are entangled in the natural landscape. And she traces how these rural working-class worlds have changed. As industry has transformed – mines closing, country estates shrinking, farmers struggling to make profit on a pint of milk, holiday lets increasing so relentlessly that local people can no longer live where they were born – we are led to question the legacy of the countryside in all our lives.
This is a book for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain.
'A brilliant book about another side of working-class life, not a tower block in sight. Clever and honest, tackling slavery, loss and aspiration with humour and candour. I loved it'
Kit de Waal, author of My Name is Leon
'A wonderful book, beautifully conceived in its movement between different dimensions of a rural working life, Smith's and her family's and all the others, both past and present ... So immediate and clearly seen, so gracefully and gently written ... It is such a valuable thing'
Adam Nicolson, author of Life Between the Tides
'A thoughtful, moving, honest book that questions what it means to belong to a place when it can never belong to you ... Timely and illuminating'
Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
'Rural tenderly reveals the precarious lives that underpin the beauty and the wealth of our countryside. Essential reading for lovers of the land and its people'
Katherine May, author of Wintering
'A powerful and important elegy to the rural workers who shape and have shaped our landscape and lives, yet remain haunted by precarity. A paean from the heart, Rebecca Smith writes working country lives back into history and gives them a place to dwell, where they often have none. A moving, tender and illuminating portrait'
Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down
'A vital, questing book about the often misunderstood past, hard present-day, and possible futures of rural life in the UK'
Dan Richards, author of Outpost and co-author of Holloway
'Too often, the lives of rural people have been overlooked or else romanticised, especially by writers. Not here ... Warm, astute and sincere'
Malachy Tallack, author of Sixty Degrees North
'A wonderful debut that has made me rethink the history and geography of our countryside. Highly recommended'
Catherine Simpson, author of When I Had a Little Sister
