Clay

Melissa Harrison is the author of the novels Clay and At Hawthorn Time, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize, and one work of non-fiction, Rain, which was longlisted forthe Wainwright Prize. She is a nature writer, critic and columnist for TheTimes, the Financial Times and the Guardian, among others. Her new novel All Among the Barley is due for publication in August this year.

@M_Z_Harrison

Eight-year-old TC skips school to explore the city's overgrown, forgotten corners. Sophia, seventy-eight, watches with concern as he slips past her window, through the little park she loves. She's writing to her granddaughter, Daisy, whose privileged upbringing means she exists in a different world from TC - though the two children live less than a mile apart.

Jozef spends his days doing house clearances, his nights working in a takeaway. He can't forget the farm he left behind in Poland, its woods and fields still a part of him, although he is a thousand miles away. When he meets TC he finds a kindred spirit: both lonely, both looking for something, both lost.

A gently-evoked urban tragedy - and the most powerful and original debut novel I've read for years

Clay moves to rhythms that we associate less with fiction than with the close-descriptive style of nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane ... At the heart of Clay is a hymn to attentiveness, both to the natural world and to those we share it with

Instantly beautiful in its calm and wise tone

Heartfelt, elegaic ... Lovingly observed

The wonderful power of her looking builds a quiet, cumulative poetry. An impressive debut

Fierce and tender ... Country come to town with lyrical, visceral power ... She evokes with rhapsodic delight the animal and plant life that still flourishes amid the concrete and Tarmac

Harrison gives lovely expression to her vision of an ecosystem thrumming away beneath the grime of city life