Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside

(Hardback)

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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

A wonderful book, beautifully conceived ADAM NICOLSON

Thoughtful, moving, honest CAL FLYN
Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land, but often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there.

Starting with Rebecca Smiths 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.

Reviews

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, Smiths 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

Author Bio

Formerly a teacher, Rebecca Smith now spends her time writing children's books inspired by her two young children and their friends. Through her organisation Link For Good, Rebecca also builds charity and social enterprise partnerships that support young people.