May’s Book of the Month is Melissa Harrison‘s ‘The Given World’ — a novel observing how the lives of people in the ancient Welm Valley intersect as the village undergoes an uneasy shift. Read an extract from the book below.

The spring sun draws life from everything it touches, giving rise, among many in the village, to a comforting illusion that all is still right with the world, and that nothing will ever change. Standing alone on the Welm’s broad and level watermeadows, the Treasure Oak, its trunk a huge, hollow gourd, dares to top its twiggy crown with a flush of small bronze foliage as soft as skin. At dawn each day the sun lights the old oak golden, colouring the rags and prayer flags and old, faded ribbons tied to some of its lower twigs. Second only in age now to the thousand-year-old yew in the churchyard, it was a jay-buried acorn, cupless and dented, when the first villager sickened from a blackening bubo in his soft inner thigh; it was early in its pomp when some of Henry VIII’s court stayed a night at the Grange, a hall house whose timbers – formed from the Treasure Oak’s antecedents – still give impressive shape to Piers Beaumont’s living room, in what is now Grange Farm.

All the village children, and some of the adults, call it the Treasure Oak, though nobody can quite say why; local records show it has been dubbed this, or something like it, for at least a century and probably more. And yet the tree’s name is not misplaced, for deep in the dark, secret heart of its cavity it keeps its own, layered history: a pebble with a rainbow painted on it; three ring-pulls and one plastic bottle top; the brass head of a shotgun cartridge; a brown hair elastic; the desiccating remains of dozens of owl pellets; a green copper farthing; the pink composite hand of a doll christened Betty; a broken bone bobbin; a miniature key, perhaps to a jewellery box or a diary; the frail skull of a corncrake and the white fin of its keel bone; and deep below and before all of the rest of it a gleaming, untarnished, yellow-gold ring.

The beeches in Bagesover Wood have also come into fresh new leaf and the spring sun slants down in warm, unwitnessed diagonals between the smooth grey pillars of the trunks to the beech mast that makes up the wood’s floor. On its way down it touches gently the trees’ fragile assemblages of brand-new leaves, each one just yesterday as tightly furled and pleated as a tiny green umbrella, now opening tentatively and collectively to find and interrupt the light.

One morning a dead badger appears on Park Farm Road, near the ‘Lower Eodham’ sign, its body quickly dark and sun-swollen; Oliver Foxall pokes it with a branch after getting off the school bus that afternoon, but its hide is tough and it won’t explode. Still, he claims the next day to have made gas whistle out of its bumhole and his younger brother Ben swears it’s true.

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‘The Given World’ is published this Thursday by Hutchinson Heinemann. Order your copy here (£18.04).

Find Melissa’s contributions to Caught by the River here.