Belinda McKeon's top 10 farming novels

Top 10sBest booksFrom Willa Cather to Stella Gibbons, the novelist picks out stories containing 'nurture, gestation, and manure. The works'

Belinda McKeon was born in Ireland in 1979 and grew up on a farm in County Longford. She lives in New York and in Ireland and writes about the arts for the Irish Times, Paris Review among others. As a playwright, McKeon has had work staged at the Abbey and Project Theatres in Dublin and at 59E59 and PS 122 in New York. She is currently under commission to the Abbey. Her first novel, Solace, is published by Picador.

Buy Solace by Belinda McKeon at the Guardian bookshop

"In university, I interviewed the novelist John McGahern for the campus newspaper; in the article, I mentioned that McGahern divided his time between farming and writing. Then I wrote something very earnest about how those 'twin arts of nurture and gestation' suited each other well. As a farmer's daughter, I should have known better. Nurture and gestation: what about drudgery, shit-shovelling, and swift kicks from irritable hindquarters? And as for the farmers, well, you know the rest.

"But it's true, I think, that there are parallels between the rhythms of farming and those of writing fiction; rhythms of watching, of waiting, of rearing things - of killing them off, when it comes to that. The farm is a self-contained world, and within its intensities and its rituals, an idiosyncratic language will evolve.

"And, given these resonances of process or of atmosphere, it's not hard to see why novels which take farming itself as their subject or their setting can be so powerful. There's a sense – and this may be only to do with the contemporary Irish novel – that a farm setting is somehow embarrassingly passé, shackled to a dreary mood, to an unadventurous style, and, most of all, to the past. But to conflate the rural or the agrarian with the past is a foolish oversimplification. The authors of these books – some written in the 1930s, some in the last few years – found in the farm an unclouded, unflinching lens for the realities of human experience. Nurture, gestation, and manure. The works."

1. Stoner by John Williams 

The farm on which William Stoner grows up in the early 1900s is bleak and dirt-poor; his father sends him to the University of Missouri to study agriculture, in the hope of bettering the family's circumstances. There, Stoner instead falls in love with literature and forges for himself an altogether different – though perhaps no less difficult – life. An extraordinary, underrated novel. Not a word is out of place.  

2. Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh 

Though limned with contempt for the small-mindedness of rural life, Kavanagh's 1948 novel is in fact something of a love song for the life of the farm; his young protagonist may be trapped by the land which he works, but this doesn't stop him from seeing its peculiar beauties. Kavanagh's graceful prose is grounded by an unbruisable wit. 

3. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather 

To riff on Kavanagh, Alexandra Bergson knew the plight – the plight, that is, of taking a punishing stretch of prairie and turning it into a prosperous farm. In the young immigrant woman who takes on the land after her father's death, Cather found a heroine through whom, in 1913, she could write about a country. But in the farmland of Nebraska, she finds one of her most compelling characters.  

4. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans 

No, it's not strictly a novel. But neither is it the straightforward journalistic assignment envisioned by Fortune magazine in 1936, when it sent Agee and Evans to write about and photograph Southern sharecroppers. The two men focused on three tenant farming families, and Agee's prose climbs to a stunning pitch as he strives to capture the stark and miserable particulars of their world. Fortune wouldn't publish it as a finished piece; now we understand the Depression through its lens.  

5. That They May Face The Rising Sun by John McGahern

In The Dark, children work like slaves on their father's farm; in Amongst Women,  steel-souled patriarch Michael Moran feels, at the end of his life, as though the land has used him. But Joe and Kate Ruttledge farm their fields around the lake not because they need to, but because they take sheer pleasure in the rituals of the farming year. The pampered cattle, the pheasant which survives the blades of the mower, the good prices at the mart; this ease and contentment seemed new territory for McGahern. It turned out to be his final novel, but it saw him come closest to the stylistic aim of inner formality and calm which he had set for himself in The Leavetaking.  

6. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff 

This novel – which seems to be set in the near future – was written for older children but must have its most haunting effect on adult readers. The narrative voice is that of Daisy, a New York teenager, who is sent to stay with cousins on a remote English farm. Soon after her arrival, her diplomat aunt goes to Oslo for urgent peacekeeping talks, leaving the children to fend for themselves. This becomes an altogether more complicated matter when, days later, war breaks out and the country is invaded by an enemy army. It's the setting of the farm, I think, which truly heightens Rosoff's vision; the sense of life everywhere becoming death everywhere is terrifying.  

7. Foster by Claire Keegan 

Keegan herself describes Foster not as a novella, but as a long story. The book should not, therefore, be included on a list of farming novels, and I've tried to persuade myself to leave it out. But I cannot. Once you've encountered it, there is no shaking off the power, the clarity, the dark beauty of the world which Keegan creates out of this story of a young girl sent to spend the summer on the farm of relatives, a childless couple who treat her with a gentleness and dignity that she seems never to have previously encountered. The farm, it turns out, has wounded her foster parents terribly, but the girl's time there is a tentative step towards healing.

  

8. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Another one in which a young woman comes to stay with her farming relatives in the middle of nowhere. This, like every other trope of the farming novel, is booted up the yard with fond irreverence by Gibbons in her 1932 satire. Broke, orphaned Flora Poste has decamped to Sussex, to the farm of the Starkadders, where the cows have names like Pointless and Aimless and the dialogue is so earthy as to be worm-eaten. Those of us who love our farming novels need to check in with this one every once in a while.   

9. God's Own Country by Ross Raisin 

His father's farm has become a prison for Sam Marsdyke, the Yorkshire teenager who is the wily but disturbed protagonist of this debut novel; accused of the rape of a classmate, he no longer goes to school and spends his days immersed in the hours of the farming day, the increasingly-gentrified moors offering his only escape – until the arrival of new neighours with a teenage daughter. Sam's eye is tack-sharp, his language intoxicatingly vivid. Raisin's depiction of the night of lambing is among the most beautiful scenes I've read in years.

10. The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer 

Of the Van Wonderen twins, Henk was the boy favoured to take over his father's farm; Helmer is the boy left behind when Helmer dies in a car crash. He is also our narrator, and it's almost 40 years later; he and his invalid father are still on the farm. Helmer's life is twisted by resentment; it stunts his yearning for change. Then the woman who was Henk's girlfriend writes to ask whether her teenage son – Henk – can come to work alongside Helmer on the farm, and Helmer comes to see what change really looks like. Bakker's prose has immense control and deeply unsettling psychological reach. 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaGpnn5jBcH2RaJmepJmjsaJ5zJyinqeeYsGwvIxqZ2aekae6qrrGZqWorpWhwA%3D%3D