Bryony Larke

She grew up around animals that could kill you and men who were unembarrassed about being gentle with them — a farrier talking a nervous two-tonne mare down to nothing, her uncle sitting all night in a barn with a cow that was struggling. That is the whole erotics of her line and she knows it: the size and the danger are real, and the carefulness is a choice made by someone who did not have to make it. The valley in her books — market days, harvest, guild apprenticeships, aunts with opinions, two peoples who have shared a road for two centuries and still get each other's manners wrong — is the Marches with the serial numbers filed off, and the etiquette gap she mines for texture is the one she watched all her life between farming families and everybody else.