A Country Wife

Twenty years ago a young Londoner named Lucy arrived in the Dorset countryside as a rather bemused bride. She knew nothing of the great outdoors and blithely agreed to spend her honeymoon harvesting. Her rural education was to be a fast and frantic one. This is the story of a woman who began rural life in romance, raised a family in the farmyard, was left by her husband just as her name was being made as a columnist for the countryside, and found a whole new life for herself in the hills and valleys she had come to love. Inspired by Lucy Pinney's popular columns for The Times, this bewitching bucolic romp is a glorious combination of Bridget Jones, I Don't Know How She Does It and Gervase Phinn. She became a farmer's wife for love of the farmer, but can Lucy's relationship with the countryside survive two decades, divorce and more mud than she ever dreamed possible?

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.