What a lovely story. Through the trials of 2020, this book, along with the BBC TV adaption of it, simultaneously let my mind escape to another time and place and kept me grounded. I've never read anything like it- a sturdy but delicately carved social history of rural England in the final decades of the nineteenth century with a lacquer of fiction applied to it. One reason I picked it up was to learn about the world in which master craftsman [a:Thomas Hardy|15905|Thomas Hardy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1429946281p2/15905.jpg] fashioned Tess and Jude. I would recommend it equally to readers of history and historical fiction.