‘Down To The River’ by Peter Rogers and Laura Cannell.

Taken from the collaborative album The Given World, inspired by Melissa Harrison’s recent novel of the same name, which was May’s Book of the Month.

Published on May 14th 2026 by Hutchinson Heinemann, The Given World is the fourth novel by Melissa Harrison. Set in the fictional English village of Lower Eodham in the Welm Valley, it is a polyphonic mystery play that takes place between the spring and autumn equinoxes ‘at the almost-end of the world’.

Each of the nine tracks on The Given World was inspired by a location, a moment or a character, from the slow, mysterious and animate river which opens and closes the book to the strange May Day revels at the pub amid the sleeping fields, and from a young man lazing on a hill as he comes down from a night out to an elderly woman who has fallen into a deep pit and hopes that help will come before night falls.

The project began with Peter Rogers creating sketches, beds and sound-worlds for the parts of the novel that resonated most with him. Laura Cannell used these as jumping-off points for improvised performances on octave violin and recorder, initially embodying the voice of the river itself but then widening out to bring to life the landscape and atmosphere of the book.

“The valley is a green crease sunk into England since forever, a place as old as anywhere, water-formed and still shaped by the river with its springs and tributaries and old lost wells, its ford where horses and wagons once splashed through the shallows and now locals know to take their cars the long way round, by the road bridge, when the water’s high. It is a place of wide, flat meadows, in summer sunlit and golden and now, in autumn, tussocky and wet. On a hill an old stone priory watches over the little village in the valley below, and can no longer atone for its sins”.

Listen to / buy the record in full here.