Most of our land lies between the wild and the urban: the rural. No bucolic retreat, it’s a fiercely contested realm.

Kate Evans’s Copse (1998) is a fabulous compendium of photos, interviews, articles and cartoons about protesting in the 1980s and 90s. As George Monbiot writes in the introduction: “The direct action campaign against road building in Britain is the most successful revolutionary movement in western Europe in the second half of the 20th century.” Copse was a DIY book for DIY protest, both a precious record and an inspirational manual for the further battles awaiting brave, (mostly) young people.

Melissa Harrison probes tensions between tradition and modernity. Her most recent novel, All Among the Barley (2018), appears to be a farming daughter’s straightforward coming-of-age story set in 30s Suffolk, yet is impossible to pin down. It’s about class, farming, folk culture, gender, politics and more, but resists glib interpretation and stays with the reader long after finishing it.

James Crowden’s Dorset Women is a book of 35 interviews with people who have forged their own rural lives – sheep shearers, pig farmers, ferret handlers, falconers, farriers, cider-makers and many others. Oral history at its best, this rich book gives us the lives of tough, independent, endlessly inventive women. It’s supplemented by George Wright’s photographic portraits.

The South of England agricultural show, Ardingly, West Sussex. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Might the past lie longer in the country than the city, hidden but still toxic? The Memory of the Forest by Charles T Powers is set in a Polish village during the dismantling of communism. A young man’s body is found in a forest. The murdered victim’s friend, Leszek, decides to investigate. He uncovers the corruption and profiteering of bureaucrats and the paranoid suspicion created within a community by party informers. He follows the trail as it continues further into the past: the German occupation, Polish antisemitism, the villagers’ complicity in the disappearance of Jews. In a work of moral and lyrical intensity, the past rises out of hidden graves to shame the present.

Cynan Jones’s The Long Dry follows struggling Welsh farmer Gareth as he spends a day searching his land for a missing heavily pregnant cow. As he walks, Gareth ponders his relationship with the land and the wildlife he shares it with and the animals he husbands; the intimacy and distance between himself and those he loves, in particular his wife, Kate; the encroachment of outside forces on the small farm that he inherited, and whose future is ever in doubt. In this short novel, Jones’s spare prose conveys brutal realities alongside fleeting beauty, building in emotional power towards a heart-shaking climax.

Another existentially lonely hero is the narrator of Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (translated from Afrikaans by JM Coetzee). A nameless former slave recounts her life’s journey towards a refuge she’s found in the trunk of a tree. Captured as a child on the coast, she was passed between slave owners in an unnamed region of Africa. Every master abused her and sold her children. Her abject experiences, her communing with nature spirits, her shifting place in the hierarchies of servants, are told in a fragmented and affectless narrative. In her uneasy lull in the baobab, surrounded by indigenous tribespeople and wildlife that might or might not prey on her, she is separate, alone. Not safe, perhaps, but free.

• Tim Pears’s West Country trilogy is published by Bloomsbury.