Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Will Millard

Accompanying the landmark BBC natural history documentary, narrated by Sir David Attenborough. 
 
Every family has its pride.Kingdom chronicles the real-life saga of four powerful animal families set in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley, a land experiencing seismic change. And these aren’t just any families.The valley is home to the fastest growing lion population in the world, the densest number of leopards in Africa, the largest population of wild dogs, and the first hyenas to receive an in-depth collared study. Leopard mother Olimba is on a mission to raise her cubs to adulthood; alpha female of the wild dog pack Storm is fiercely determined to lead her pack to new plains; hyena sisters Toto and Tandala vie to become clan queen; lion brothers evade hunters and lead their pride in the valley. 
 
As their world shrinks around them, the families are pushed closer together until they come head-to-head in a battle against each other for the land.Featuring stunning full-colour photography, Kingdom charts the tumultuous existence of these real animal characters as they compete to exist in the increasingly threatened Luangwa Valley.

Kingdom

Every family has its pride

James Rebanks

As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. 
 
English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the Lake District fells is also a song of hope: how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. 
 
This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

English Pastoral

An Inheritance

Terry Tempest Williams

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
The Clan of One-Breasted Women, bringing together the best of writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams' essays, explores the impact of nuclear testing, the importance of environmental legislation, and the spirit of conservation.

The Clan of One-Breasted Women

Mayer Hillman

Mayer Hillman, one of Britain's most original and influential thinkers, here offers the reader both a stunning analysis of the looming environmental catastrophe and a blueprint for avoiding it. The blueprint is practical at a personal level but the challenge he throws out is to governments and business: do they have the political courage to take the necessary steps to avert the end of the world? He anticipates the counter-arguments and gives the reader the ammunition to challenge the prevailing inaction in these areas. 
Stimulating, challenging, frightening but also practical, this is a book that will help you make a difference.

How We Can Save the Planet

Malena Ernman

Greta Thunberg

Beata Ernman

Svante Thunberg

This is the story of a happy family whose life suddenly fell apart, never to be the same again. Of two devoted parents plunged into a waking nightmare as their eleven-year-old daughter stopped speaking and eating, and her younger sister struggled to cope. 
 
This crisis was not theirs alone: they were burned-out people on a burned-out planet. 
 
Our House is on Fire is the story of how one family found ways to strengthen, heal, and gain courage from the love they had for each other - and for the living world. It is a parable of hope and determination in an emergency that affects us all.

Our House is on Fire

Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

Mya-Rose Craig

Discover Mya-Rose Craig's moving and life-affirming memoir about family, searching for rare birds, and the power of our natural world. 
 
'Lyrical, poignant and insightful' MARGARET ATWOOD (on Twitter) 
'Filled with hope and energy' Guardian 
 
In her memoir, Mya-Rose Craig and her family travel the world in search of rare birds and astonishing landscapes. But a shadow moves with them, too - her mother's deepening mental health crisis. In the face of this struggle, the Craigs turn to nature again and again, and every time it offers joy and stillness. 
 
On these journeys, Mya-Rose also witnesses the inequality and destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet. And so, through the simple, mindful act of looking for birds, she becomes ever more determined to campaign for all our survival. 
 
'A delightful account of a young life devoted to birding - and the fight to save birds and the places they live' Stephen Moss 
 
* Winner of a Somerset Maugham Award * 
* Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing * 
* Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize *

Birdgirl

Discovering the Power of Our Natural World

Kristen Iversen

It is the early 1950s. Kristen Iversen is enjoying a carefree childhood surrounded by desert and mountains. But just a few miles down the road, the US government decides to build a secret nuclear weapons facility at Rocky Flats. 
 
Kirsten and her siblings jump streams, ride horses, live a happy outdoors life. But beneath this veneer her family is quietly falling apart. Her father drinks, her mother copes. 
 
And in a series of fires, accidents and other catastrophic leaks, Rocky Flats nuclear plant is spewing an invisible cocktail of the most dangerous substances on earth into this pristine landscape. The ground, the air and the water are all alive with radiation. 
 
The years that follow will bring protests, investigations, denials, cover-ups, threats and lies. And then, one after another, people start to fall ill.

Full Body Burden

Growing Up in the Shadow of a Secret Nuclear Facility

Alice Mah

'Part of me knew what the hungry ghosts wanted all along, what they still want. It is not vengeance. No, they want something else, but we refuse to listen. They want us to face up to our broken obligations.' 
 
Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors, making offerings of food and incense to prevent them from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune. Yet for the past century, a time ruptured by war and revolution, many tombs have been left unattended. Following a record year of wildfires, Alice Mah returns to her family’s rice village in South China, and discovers that her ancestors are almost forgotten, and there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid. 
 
Here Mah chronicles her journey from the rice villages of South China to her home in post-industrial England, through the Chinatowns of Western Canada where she grew up, to the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors’ neglected graves. Her research on pollution gives way to growing eco-anxiety, culminating in a crisis of spiritual belief. 
 
A haunting blend of memoir, cultural history and environmental exploration, Red Pockets confronts the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, while searching for an acceptable offering. What do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?

Red Pockets

An Offering

Lorna Siggins

'All I want is to stay where I am . . . My heart and soul are in this place.' 
(Willie Corduff, one of The Rossport Five) 
 
In a remote, beautiful part of the west of Ireland, a David and Goliath struggle rages between multinational oil company, Shell, and some of the local community of Rossport, County Mayo. 
 
In 1996, Enterprise Oil, subsequently bought by Shell, found a major source of valuable gas offshore in the Corrib gas field. In the attempt to build an onshore pipeline and refinery the oil giant has come into conflict with a small group of locals who, anxious about the safety of their families, the environmental impact of the project and the future of their community, are resisting Shell's plans. The eyes of the nation fell on this tiny community when, in 2005, five of the residents were jailed for refusing to allow Shell onto their land, in contempt of court orders. These men have become known as The Rossport Five. 
 
Irish Times correspondent Lorna Siggins has been covering the controversy from the beginning. No one is better placed to unravel the twists and turns of this fascinating human drama and its political, cultural and environmental shockwaves. 
 
In a new Ireland where economic logic goes largely unchallenged, the Corrib Gas pipeline controversy raises uncomfortable questions about the ways in which Ireland has changed.

Once Upon a Time in the West

The Corrib Gas Controversy

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. 
 
Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island. 
 
This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for gathering, like feathered gold. 
 
Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not what he had previously thought. What began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge, forgiveness and how to make lasting change.

The Place of Tides

David Bellamy

David Bellamy is a natural story teller whose memoir will be packed full of funny anecdotes and observations. It is the story of how a city boy, brought up in the middle of London, went for a trip into the countryside one day, an event which was to transform his life by setting in motion the amazing love of nature which would make famous this larger-than-life character. In his infectious style he illumines on, amongst other things, the fact that his father, the manager of a branch of Boots, had to grease his hair straight - because in those days managers of Boots weren't allowed to have curly hair! Then there was the time he and his brother discovered an exploded bomb, kept in the garden shed - and then accidentally blew off the front of the house with it. He reveals his secret passion is  ballet dancing - and how his mother only found out about it when she saw him on stage at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon.  His career as an academic, then author, broadcaster, consultant and television personality, spans 35 years and his main passion - campaigning for the environment - have led to many adventures including his being twice imprisoned in the Third World.

Jolly Green Giant

Gregory Zuckerman

In 2006 the US was running out of energy. From running a city to turning on a lightbulb, the entire country depended on dwindling energy sources tied up in international politics. Then came the Frackers. 
 
Ambitious and headstrong, these few pioneers - some without degrees or backgrounds in geology - risked their livelihoods in the stubborn search under the soil. What they found transformed the nation, and the world. 
 
With exclusive access, award-winning reporter Gregory Zuckerman chronicles their untold story for the first time and explores just how dangerous fracking really is.

The Frackers

The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Energy Revolution

Eric Schlosser

Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a missile silo in rural Arkansas, where a single crew struggled to prevent the explosion of the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States, with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort to ensure that nuclear weapons can't be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with men who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view.

Command and Control

Luke Kemp

A radical retelling of human history through collapse – from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twenty-first century and beyond. 
 
** FEATURED IN THE NEW BBC SERIES CIVILISATIONS: RISE AND FALL ** 
** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ** 
 
‘A brilliant, utterly convincing account of the evolution of human society and why we are probably reaching humanity's end days’ HENRY MARSH 
 
'Absolutely essential reading for understanding why past civilisations collapsed, and how to protect our own from the same fate' LEWIS DARTNELL 
 
For the first 300,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilizations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change. 
 
As we reluctantly congregated in the first farms and cities, people began to rely on novel lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. And when more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organization. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires – with vast bureaucracies and militaries – carved up and dominated the globe. 
 
What brought them down? Whether in the early cities of Cahokia in North America or Tiwanaku in South America, or the sprawling empires of Egypt, Rome and China, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power that hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population. 
 
Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now face a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last. 
 
'An excellent survey of human history through the collapses of Goliath-like kings, states and empires' OBSERVER 
 
'A comprehensive overview of societal collapse, based on the analysis of dozens of cases spanning thousands of years from the Paleolithic to today. Highly recommended' PETER TURCHIN 
 
'A deeply sobering and strangely inspiring history of how societies collapse - and how we can still save ours. Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins' JOHANN HARI 
 
'Like reading Thomas Piketty filtered through Mad Max' NEW YORK TIMES

Goliath’s Curse

The History and Future of Societal Collapse

Sunil Amrith

In this paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of the expansion of human freedom and its costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Spanish silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railways and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against nature. Amrith’s account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. He also reveals the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates, on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic – vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images – in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

The Burning Earth

An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years

Dara McAnulty

WINNER OF BOOK OF THE YEAR, NARRATIVE NON-FICTION BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 2021 
 
Rediscover the natural world with the multi-award winning phenomenon and youngest ever major literary prize winner in UK history. 
 
'Miraculous memoir . . . profoundly moving' Observer 
 
'Dara is an extraordinary voice and vision: brave, poetic, ethical, lyrical' Robert Macfarlane 
 
 'It's a diary but essentially timeless . . . It's really, really special' Chris Packham 
 
ALSO WINNER OF: THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2020, AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARD FOR NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR 2020, BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARDS FOR NON-FICTION 2020; SHORTLISTED FOR: WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 &amp; LONGLISTED FOR: THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2020 
 ___________ 
 
 'This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head.' 
 
Evocative, raw and lyrical, this startling debut explores the natural world through the eyes of Dara McAnulty, an autistic teenager coping with the uprooting of home, school, and his mental health, while pursuing his life as a conservationist and environmental activist. 
 
Shifting from intense darkness to light, recalling his sensory encounters in the wild - with blackbirds, whooper swans, red kites, hen harriers, frogs, dandelions, Irish hares and more - McAnulty reveals worlds we have neglected to see, in a stunning world of nature writing that is a future classic. 
 
Diary of a Young Naturalist is a powerful and scintillating portrayal of the beauty of the natural world, as it shines a light on autism and of overcoming severe anxiety. It is a story of the binding love of family and home, and how we can help each other through the most difficult of times. 
 ___________ 
 
 BIG ISSUE BOOK OF THE YEAR 
HAY FESTIVAL BOOK OF THE YEAR 
A TIMES NATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
 'An extraordinary diary' The Times 
 
'A torrent of pure, unmediated fervour . . . This is writing at its wild and unruly best' Dr Rachel Clarke 
 
 'Diary of a Young Naturalist is not only one of the finest pieces of modern nature writing produced on this island in recent years, McAnulty is one of our best young writers in any genre' Irish Independent 
 
'An exceptional new voice. Dara McAnulty celebrates nature in such a fresh way and illuminates 
our understanding of autism' Martha Kearney, chair of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2020 
 
'One of the most talented and passionate writers of our era' Steve Silberman, award-winning author of NeuroTribes 
 ___________

Diary of a Young Naturalist

WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2020

Eugene Linden

The definitive history of the modern climate change era, from an award-winning writer who has been at the centre of the fight for more than thirty years 
 
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter was presented with the findings of scientists who had been investigating whether human activities might change the climate in harmful ways. "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late," their report said. They were right -- but no one was listening. Four decades later, we are haunted by the consequences of this inattention, and the years of complacency, obfuscation and denialism that followed. Today, the staggering scale and scope of what we have done to the planet is impossible to ignore: the seasons of fire and flood have crossed into plain view. 
 
Fire and Flood is a comprehensive, compulsively readable history of climate change from veteran environmental journalist Eugene Linden. Linden retells the story of the modern climate change era decade by decade, tracking the progress of four ticking clocks: first, the reality of climate change itself; second, advances in scientific understanding; third, the spread of public awareness; and fourth, the business and finance response. Like no previous writer, Linden has drawn together the elements of the biggest story in the world, in a book that it is gripping as history, as economic investigation, and as scientific thriller.

Fire and Flood

A People's History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present

Ben Dark

The half a million species of plant alive today are a mere 3% of the vast number of plant species ever to have existed. All share a single common origin: the first plant-like algae to wash up on land 484 million years ago. 
 
Through the stories of sixteen plant families, each representing a distinct evolutionary lineage, Green Kingdom tells the epic story of how plant-life emerged, adapted and came to shape our planet, from the development of stems, leaves, trunks and seeds, through to the emergence of flowers, poisons, carnivory and parasitism. Taking us into the lives and minds of the adventurers, poets, philosophers and scientists who pieced this staggeringly rich and dramatic story together over two millennia of observation and enquiry, Dark reveals how each turning point in the development of plants can be traced to a defining event in the planet’s history: catastrophic asteroid strikes, volcanic chain eruptions, sudden glaciations, or the gradual parting of continents. 
 
Reanimating ancient lost worlds, and bringing the wonder and stupendous variety of plants to life as never before, Green Kingdom is both a hidden history of the earth and a family saga, as rich and unexpected as any story ever told.

Green Kingdom

The Family History of Plants

Paul Wood

The Rebel Tree. The Climber’s Lime. The Ecclesiastical Pear. 
 
In Tree Hunting, Paul Wood seeks out the best individual trees – the most charismatic, quirky or downright spectacular – that grow in Britain and Ireland's towns, cities and villages (and, in one case, from the crack in a church steeple). From a stumpy sycamore in Shetland, contorted by wind and hard weather, to the shining jewel in Brighton’s unlikely treasure trove of elms, Paul travels on a quest from north to south rooting out the legends and tall tales behind these marvellous specimens. As he delves into this rich ecosystem, he reveals how trees are inextricably bound to the story of our towns and cities: they have always meant a great deal to those that live near them, and they continue to shape the fabric of urban life in deep, and often surprising ways. 
 
Including sumptuous maps, grid references and charming travel notes so you can plan adventures of your own, Tree Hunting will help you unlock the secrets of Britain and Ireland's urban forests.

Tree Hunting

1,000 Trees to Find in Britain and Ireland’s Towns and Cities

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Kostas Stasinopoulos

Artists are uniquely situated to present new ideas about how we are living, the materials that make up our lives and how we can begin to work together to tackle the most urgent crisis of our time. 
 
Featuring Ed Ruscha's memorial plaques to trees that didn't make it, Judy Chicago's urge to make a mark and express a feeling, Jacob V Joyce and Rudy Loewe's activism flowchart, James Bridle's instructions to help plants along with their global velocity, Vivienne Westwood's plea for lockdown not to be lost, Olafur Eliasson's poetic wisdom to 'look up, look down', Marina Abramovic's performance art for the climate, and Rose Wylie's recipe for cooking for the environment, alongside many more.

140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth

Leo Hickman

How often in life does convenience triumph over 'doing the right thing? And what is 'ethical living' anyway? When it comes down to it, most people fight shy of giving up their cars, or their toxic household products, their cheap washing machines, or dodgy, unethical bank accounts in order to make the world a better place. So Leo Hickman, resident consumer expert of the Guardian, decided to give it a try. Over the course of a year, he and his family set out to discover whether it was possible to live a 'normal life' - job, mortgage, kids, holidays - while at the same time making each daily choice or decision an 'ethical' one - for the family, their neighbours and the environment. This the story of that year, is a record of an extraordinary transformation. Amid the pitfalls and confusion, Leo's account is funny, inspirational and a mine of information for the curious.

A Life Stripped Bare

My Year Trying To Live Ethically

James Lovelock

For millennia, humankind has exploited the Earth without counting the cost. Now, as the world warms and weather patterns dramatically change, the Earth is beginning to fight back. James Lovelock, one of the giants of environmental thinking, argues passionately and poetically that, although global warming is now inevitable, we are not yet too late to save at least part of human civilization. This short book, written at the age of eighty-six after a lifetime engaged in the science of the earth, is his testament.

The Revenge of Gaia

Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity

Daphne Sheldrick

A typical day for Daphne involves rescuing baby elephants from poachers; finding homes for orphan elephants, all the while campaigning the ever-present threat of poaching for the ivory trade. 
 
An African Love Story is the incredible memoir of her life. It tells two stories - one is the extraordinary love story which blossomed when Daphne fell head over heels with Tsavo Game Park and its famous warden, David Sheldrick. The second is the love story of how Daphne and David, who devoted their lives to saving elephant orphans, at first losing every infant under the age of two until Daphne at last managed to devise the first-ever milk formula which would keep them alive.

An African Love Story

Love, Life and Elephants

Edward Posnett

'Exceptional...a subtle, fascinating braiding of travel, cultural and natural history... It is a pleasure and an education to journey with Posnett in these pages' ROBERT MACFARLANE 
 
In a centuries-old tradition, farmers in north-western Iceland scour remote coastal plains for the down of nesting eider ducks. High inside a cast cave in Borneo, men perched on rickety ladders collect swiftlets' nests, a delicacy believed to be a cure for almost anything. 
 
 These luxury products are two of the seven natural wonders whose stories Harvest tells: eiderdown, vicuña wool, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano and edible birds' nests. It follows their journey from the wildest parts of the planet, traversing Iceland, Indonesia, and Peru, to its urban centres, drawing on the voices of the gatherers, shearers and entrepreneurs who harvest, process and trade them. 
 
 Blending interviews, history and travel writing, Harvest sets these human stories against our changing economic and ecological landscape, and makes us see the world with wonder, curiosity and new concern. 
 
(Previously published as Harvest)

Strange Harvests

The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects

Jason Allen-Paisant

The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England. 
 
Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today. 
 
Mama, the author’s grandmother, is a central protagonist of the story. Alongside her, herbalists, plant workers, farmers, and plant lovers help forge an intimate portrait of Coffee Grove, as do the plants themselves; fever grass, jointa, search mi heart, leaf of life, helping Allen-Paisant revise his sense of self and solidify a new understanding of his place in the world. 
 
The Possibility of Tenderness is a cross-pollinating book about the transformative power of plants, the legacy of dreams, and the lessons they offer for living with the earth.

The Possibility of Tenderness

A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams

Tom Moorhouse

A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE WEEK: 'particularly enjoyable' 
'Somehow laugh-out-loud funny - passionate, warm and full of fascinating insights into the eccentric world of the field naturalist.' - Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 
 
Water voles are small, brownish, bewhiskered and charming. Made famous by 'Ratty' in The Wind in the Willows, once they were a ubiquitous part of our waterways. They were a totem of our rivers. Now, however, they are nearly gone. This is their story, and the story of a conservationist with a wild hope: that he could bring them back. 
 
Tom Moorhouse spent eleven years beside rivers, fens, canals, lakes and streams, researching British wildlife. Quite a lot of it tried to bite him. He studied four main species - two native and endangered, two invasive and endangering - beginning with water voles. He wanted to solve their conservation problems. He wanted to put things right. 
 
This book is about whether it worked, and what he learnt - and about what those lessons mean, not just for water voles but for all the world's wildlife. It is a book for anyone who has watched ripples spread on lazy waters, and wondered what moves beneath. Or who has waited in quiet hope for a rustle in the reeds, the munch of a stem, or the patter of unseen paws. 
 
Praise for Tom Moorhouse: 
 
'The pages of this book are shot through with quicksilver light reflected from wet fur - not a lament for our rivers but a chorus of hope for their future.' - Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path 
 
'Beautiful and important. Tom's book is extraordinary in its gentle curiosity and sympathy for his subjects. I love this book.' - Sir Tim Smit KBE, Executive Vice-Chairman and Co-founder of the Eden Project 
 
'Terrific. Lightly but beautifully written. Very moving. Water voles are adorable little beasts. They are also tough, randy and stroppy, as Tom Moorhouse makes clear in this wry, amusing account of the often bloody, painful and frustrating business of conservation fieldwork. 'I hold stubbornly to optimism,' he declares, and his Elegy for a River demands that we do the same.' - Christopher Somerville, walking correspondent for The Times and author of The January Man

Elegy For a River

Whiskers, Claws and Conservation’s Last, Wild Hope

James Martin

James Martin, one of the world's most widely respected authorities on the impact of technology on society, argues that we are living at a turning point in human history. 'We are travelling at breakneck speed into an era of extremes - extremes of wealth and poverty, extremes in technology, extremes in globalization. If we are to survive, we must learn how to manage them all.' Although we face huge challenges and conflicts, Martin argues that it is in the scientific breakthroughs of the new century that we will find new hope. In a clear, penetrating and insightful style he addresses the key questions of our age and proposes an interconnected set of solutions to its problems.

The Meaning Of The 21st Century

A Vital Blueprint For Ensuring Our Future

James Lovelock, who has been hailed as 'the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin' (Independent), continues in his 95th year to be the great scientific visionary of our age. This book introduces two new Lovelockian ideas. The first is that 300 years ago the invention of the steam engine unknowingly began a process which is bringing about change on our planet roughly a million times faster than Darwinian evolution. The second is that as part of this process, humanity has the capacity to become the directing intelligence of Gaia, the self-regulating Earth system whose discovery Lovelock first announced nearly 50 years ago. In addition, Lovelock gives his reflections on how scientific advances are made, and his own remarkable life as a lone scientist.

A Rough Ride to the Future

Anthony Bourke

John Rendall

In 2008, a YouTube clip became an internet phenomenon. It showed the emotional reunion of two young men and their pet lion, Christian, after they had left him in Africa to be introduced into his rightful home in the wild. 
 
Anthony 'Ace' Bourke and John Rendall visited London from Australia in 1969 and bought a boisterous lion cub in Harrods. But Christian soon grew from cuddly cub to King of the Kings Road in London, and the only way to avoid him being incarcerated in a zoo was to place him under the expert care of George Adamson in Kenya. Ace and John did not return to see their lion for a year. 
 
A Lion Called Christian tells their touching story, accompanied by stunning photographs. It's a unique and extraordinary tale of its time that resonates again today with a worldwide audience, thanks to the internet age, and is destined to become one of the great classics of animal literature.

A Lion Called Christian

Caleb Femi

What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? 
 
In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. 
 
Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.'

Poor

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

The Fall of the West

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

The Mortons

Little Black Classics Box Set

Watch a trailer for The Spook's Blood

A photograph of Ben Barnes in character for Shadow and Bone Netflix series.

Interviews

Shadow and Bone’s Ben Barnes on tear-jerking books and what he’s reading

An image showing a selection of adventure stories for 9-12 year olds on a bright yellow background with orange doodles that include a hashtag, flag, danger sign and speech bubble

Children's reading lists

16 books for 9 to 12-year-olds that love adventures

An image of a selection of books for 9-12s on a blue background with a large splodge and striped print

24 must-read books for 9-12-year-olds

A picture of several different children's books on a pink to blue ombre background; each book has a bright yellow shadow

Showing results for: ‘joseph delaney’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter