Given that insects vastly outnumber us (there are approximately 200 million insects for every human) it is no surprise that there is a rich body of verse on the creeping, scuttling, flitting, stinging things with which we share our planet.

Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of landscapes.