THE STORY BEGINS with my great-grandmother, born a farmer's daughter on the first day of the new century in a village on the North Sea.

Alma has grown up on her family's stories.

The sowing in the spring, the haymaking in summer, the potato harvest in autumn. The day Grandmother heard the planes come, and knew the war had begun. The dark-eyed Austrian soldier who approached her as she walked home from the baker's.

But woven into the picture of the past Alma has inherited are also strange, magical details: a boy who sleeps for years and years. A midwife who attends every birth throughout the years, never seeming to age, and her counterpart: the woman who lays out all the dead.

From a dazzling new voice in European literature, Spoil the Harvest recounts a century of rural life in luminous fragments. With dark, laconic wit and wild, shimmering imagination, it explores how we are shaped by the rhythms and cycles of the earth - and by the dreams and fears of all those who have gone before us.