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Merlin Hanbury-Tenison

An enormously moving and inspiring story about war, trauma, nature and rebirth, written with infectious passion and unsparing honesty. I loved it. - DOMINIC SANDBROOK 
 
Scholarly, wise, funny, charming, terrifying and thrilling... I adored it all, every page. - JOANNA LUMLEY 
 
Both a comfort and an inspiration - CHLOE DALTON, author of Raising Hare 
 
This is a lovely book - wise, brave, thoughtful, painfully intimate - but with a remarkable spiritual and environmental vision. - RORY STEWART 
 
An extraordinarily courageous, urgent and powerful book. - ISABELLA TREE 
 
Deeply compelling... emotional, informative, pleasurable. I believe that this is an important work with planet-sized dreams and ambitions. Perhaps the greatest philosophy or teachable lesson that came to me off the page is that dominion comes with responsibility. - RUSSELL CROWE 
 
I love this book. - RICK STEIN 
 
Powerfully enchanting, written with verve and imbued with hope. - GUY SHRUBSOLE 
 
I lie on the rock to let my limbs dry after my immersion in the river. My bones warm. I have no towel but the moss is grateful for the additional moisture that I bring as the water runs off me and into its spongy web of roots and branches. I look up through the canopy and time freezes as the oak leaves drift gently backwards and forwards, dappling the light as it falls onto my body. 
 
I am home. 
 
Reeling from the pain of devastating miscarriages and suffering from PTSD after military adventures in Afghanistan, Merlin and his wife Lizzie decide to leave the bustle of London and return to Merlin’s childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor. 
 
There, they are met by unexpected challenges: a farm slipping ever further into debt, the discovery that the overgrazed and damaged woods running throughout the valley are in fact one of the UK’s last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, and the sudden and near catastrophic strickening by Covid of Merlin’s father, the explorer Robin. As they fall more in love with the rainforest that Merlin had adventured in as a child, so begins a fight to save not only themselves and their farm, but also one of the world’s most endangered habitats. 
 
Our Oaken Bones is an honest and intimate true story about renewal, the astonishing healing power of nature, and our duty to heal it in return. 
 
Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. For fans of The Salt Path and The Lost Rainforests of Britain.

Our Oaken Bones

Reviving a Family, a Farm and Britain’s Ancient Rainforests

Danielle Steel

On a warm May night in San Francisco, a glittering, celebrity-studded crowd gathers for a charity event. Just minutes before midnight, the room begins to sway. Glass shatters, the lights go out, and people start to scream.... 
 
In the earthquake's aftermath, the lives of four strangers will converge: 
 
Sarah Sloane, the beautiful wife of a financial star, watches her perfect world fall to pieces. 
Melanie Free, award-winning singer, comes to a turning point in her career. 
Everett Carson, a former war correspondent whose personal demons have demoted him to covering society parties, finds new purpose amid the carnage. 
Sister Maggie Kent, a nun who does her best work in jeans and trainers, searches through the rubble - and knows instantly that there is much work to be done. 
 
The city staggers back to life, and a chain reaction will touch each of the survivors as they find the amazing grace of new beginnings.

Amazing Grace

An Yu

In Five Poems Lake, a small village surrounded by impenetrable deserts, the sun is slowly disappearing overhead. A young woman keeps an apprehensive eye on the sky above as she tends her family’s pharmacy of traditional medicine. She has few customers, and even fewer visitors. Her father was found dead by the lake twelve years ago, in unexplained circumstances. Her elder sister, Dong Ji, works at a wellness parlour across town for those who can afford it – which, during these strange and difficult days, is not many. 
 
The town fell on hard times long before the sun began to shrink, but now, every few days, a new sliver disappears. As the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the inhabitants of the town realise that there is no way they can survive. But when the Beacons appear – ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns – the residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. Soon, Dong Ji and her sister will uncover a photograph which may offer a clue in the mystery of the Beacons, and finally help them learn what happened to their father. 
 
Sunbirth honours the unique relationship between sisters, their love for each other and their desire to be free. Richly surreal and anchored by searching curiosity and wisdom, it asks how much we can ever know about the deepest mysteries of the world.

Sunbirth

Steven Lovatt

'At this time of year, blackbirds never simply fly: instead, like reluctantly retired officers, they're always "on manoeuvres", and it's easy to see from their constant agitation that for them every flower bed is a bunker, every shed a redoubt and every hedge-bottom a potential place of ambush' 
 
As the world went silent in lockdown, something else happened; for the first time, many of us started becoming more aware of the spring sounds of the birds around us. Birdsong in a Time of Silence is a lyrical, uplifting reflection on these sounds and what they mean to us. 
 
From a portrait of the blackbird - most prominent and articulate of the early spring singers - to explorations of how birds sing, the science behind their choice of song and nest-sites, and the varied meanings that people have brought to and taken from birdsong, this book ultimately shows that natural history and human history cannot be separated. It is the story of a collective reawakening brought on by the strangest of springs.

Birdsong in a Time of Silence

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

Carys Bray

'A powerful and truthful story about hope and how to find it' The Times 
'A gem of a book' Emily Maitlis 
 
Emma's husband Chris is fretting about starvation and societal collapse. He's turned off the heating and is stockpiling off-label medicines and tins of baked beans. 
 
Chris, certain that society will soon spiral to its doom, finds Emma's optimism exasperating. Emma finds Chris's obsession with disaster relentless. She's beginning to wonder whether relationships, like mortgages, should be conducted in five-year increments. But when Chris's mother turns up for a visit, the cracks begin to show. Will Emma and Chris be able to find their way back to each other?

When the Lights Go Out

Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert). 
 
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Sam Lee

'Wondering and wonderful. The nature book of the year.' JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL 
 
'This lovely book is almost as thrilling as the bird's immortal song - balm for a troubled soul and a glimpse of paradise.' JOANNA LUMLEY 
______________________________ 
Come to the forest, sit by the fireside and listen to intoxicating song, as Sam Lee tells the story of the nightingale. 
 
Every year, as darkness falls upon woodlands, the nightingale heralds the arrival of Spring. Throughout history, its sweet song has inspired musicians, writers and artists around the world, from Germany, France and Italy to Greece, Ukraine and Korea. 
 
Here, passionate conservationist, renowned musician and folk expert Sam Lee tells the story of the nightingale. This book reveals in beautiful detail the bird's song, habitat, characteristics and migration patterns, as well as the environmental issues that threaten its livelihood. 
 
From Greek mythology to John Keats, to Persian poetry and 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square', Lee delves into the various ways we have celebrated the nightingale through traditions, folklore, music, literature, from ancient history to the present day. The Nightingale is a unique and lyrical portrait of a famed yet elusive songbird. 
______________________________ 
'Sam Lee has brought the poetic magic that has long enchanted so many of his musical fans into the written word. Allow yourself to glimpse the world Sam sees, to be part of his love affair with the nightingale, and you will no doubt be delighted.' LILY COLE 
 
'A wonderful book.' STEPHEN MOSS 
 
'A magical marriage of the lyrical and practical: a book that makes us want to seek out the nightingale and then reveals how we can.' TRISTAN GOOLEY

The Nightingale

‘The nature book of the year’

George Monbiot

How many of us sometimes feel that we are scratching at the walls of this life, seeking to find our way into a wider space beyond? That our mild, polite existence sometimes seems to crush the breath out of us? Feral is the lyrical and gripping story of George Monbiot's efforts to re-engage with nature and discover a new way of living. He shows how, by restoring and rewilding our damaged ecosystems on land and at sea, we can bring wonder back into our lives. Making use of some remarkable scientific discoveries, Feral lays out a new, positive environmentalism, in which nature is allowed to find its own way.

Feral

Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life

Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding

Nick Rosen

Off-grid: a place, building or person without mains water or power. 
 Static or mobile - in a house or a hut, a boat or a camper van - to live off-grid is all about loosending the ties that bind us to teh fmailiar world of commuting, mortgages, no time and fast food, in order to rediscover our place in the natural world. 
 Complete with camper van, Nick sets off around the UK to find off-grid heaven and meet people who are living the dream. Along the way he runs into backpackers and businessmen, radical hermits and right-wing survivalists - and plenty of ordinary working-parent families too. 
 Sincere but irreverent, this is Nick's guide to avoiding pitfalls, to finding solutions (and some brilliant gadgets) as he strives to perfect the skills of this practical, freewheeling kind of self-sufficiency. 
 'Timely and highly readable' Sunday Telegraph 
 ' Nick Rosen has caught the zeitgeist.' The Times

How to Live Off-Grid

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

Tania James

'There he was, his trunk wrapped in hers. Whatever hurt or sorrow befell him was not really happening to him. He was on the other bank with his mother. He was not here' 
 
When a young elephant is brutally orphaned by poachers, he begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name, the Gravedigger, from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves. Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting. 
 
Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption, until eventually she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal. 
 
'One of the most unusual and affecting books... a compulsively readable, devastating novel' Jonathan Safran Foer 
 
*Tania James's spellbinding new novel Loot is available for pre-order now!* 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.

The Tusk That Did the Damage

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

Katie Fforde

Dominica. A beautiful remote island where the sun shines and the living is easy. 
 
And where Cass goes to photograph a rare stone carving as a favour to her father. 
 
With her is Ranulph, a deeply attractive, much-travelled journalist, who offers to help Cass with her quest. 
 
But Dominica has just been hit be a severe hurricane, and Cass and Ranulph are spending all of their time helping the local community. 
 
Cass knows she must not fall in love with him… He is just looking out for her. He’s being kind. 
 
There is no way he could be even the slightest bit interested in her. Could he? 
___________ 
 
Love for Katie Fforde ... 
 
'The queen of uplifting, feel good romance' AJ PEARCE 
'Top-drawer romantic escapism' DAILY MAIL 
'Warm, brilliant and full of love' HEAT

Island in the Sun

Jay Griffiths

'I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end - a strangely sweet result - I came back to a wild home' 
 
Wild describes an extraordinary odyssey, courageous and sometimes dangerous, to wildernesses of earth and ice, water and fire. It is by turns funny, touching and harrowing, and offers a poetic consideration of the tender connection between human society and wild lands. Wild won the inaugural Orion Book Award for 2007 and was shortlisted for the Orwell prize and for the World Book Day award.

Wild

An Elemental Journey

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

Richard Flanagan

'Striking...brilliantly done' The Times 
 
An ember storm of a novel, this is Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan at his most moving-and astonishing-best. 
 
Anna's aged mother is dying - if her three children would just allow it. Forced by their pity to stay alive, she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight. 
 
When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into a strangely beautiful novel about hope, love and orange-bellied parrots. 
 
'One of our greatest living novelists' Washington Post

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

From the Booker prize-winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Lance Richardson

'Magnificent' ROBERT MACFARLANE 
'Fascinating' KATHERINE MAY 
'Irresistible' KATHERINE BUCKNELL 
‘Perceptive and consistently readable’ CAL FLYN 
 
Discover the many lives of Peter Matthiessen – writer, naturalist, activist, CIA agent, Zen master – in this kaleidoscopic biography of an American literary giant. 
 
Author of The Snow Leopard, co-founder of the Paris Review and the only writer to have ever won the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction, Peter Matthiessen was a towering figure of twentieth-century American literary culture. He was also, briefly, an undercover agent for the fledgling CIA; an environmental activist; an advocate for Native American rights and California farmworkers; friends with the likes of Truman Capote and William Styron; and a daring explorer who visited every continent on Earth, scaling the Himalayas and floating through the Amazon on a balsawood raft. 
 
Across these many lives, Matthiessen was always searching for what he called his ‘true nature’ – an enlightened state of being, without ego – and this spiritual quest ultimately led him, even as he inflicted great pain on three wives and multiple children, to the highest ranks of Zen. 
 
Readers and critics have struggled to reconcile Matthiessen’s extraordinarily varied achievements and literary output, which included everything from experimental novels to advocacy journalism. Now, for the first time, drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, acclaimed biographer Lance Richardson pulls together the seemingly disparate threads of Matthiessen’s story. With page-turning immediacy, Richardson illuminates how the writer’s uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism and labour exploitation – to express, eloquently and presciently, that ‘in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge’.

True Nature

The Lives of Peter Matthiessen

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

Joycelyn Longdon

A lyrical, deeply researched and original work of narrative non-fiction that examines 6 key pillars: RAGE, IMAGINATION, INNOVATION, THEORY, HEALING and CARE to showcase the wonder of the natural world and inspire us to view climate action as a shared goal rather than individual burden. 
 
University of Cambridge AI, environmental justice and bioacoustics researcher and educator Joycelyn Longdon reveals how extraordinary acts from ordinary people of colour - from the US to the UK, Brazil to Iran, Ghana to Ethiopia - paved the way for today's technological advances. Merging ancient wisdom with modern tools, she invites readers to embrace new roles in the fight for sustainability beyond activist and observer, guiding us back to our roots.

Natural Connection

What indigenous wisdom & marginalised people teach us about environmental action

Elif Shafak

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna It is 1974 on the island of Cyprus. Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine. But there is something else to the place: it makes one forget, even if for just a few hours, the world outside and its immoderate sorrows. 
 
In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, their silent, surreptitious departures; and the tree will be there when the war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to rubble, when the teenagers vanish and break apart. 
 
Decades later in north London, sixteen-year-old Ada Kazantzakis has never visited the island where her parents were born. Desperate for answers, she seeks to untangle years of secrets, separation and silence. The only connection she has to the land of her ancestors is a Ficus Carica growing in the back garden of their home. 
 
In The Island of Missing Trees, prizewinning author Elif Shafak brings us a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, memory and amnesia, human-induced destruction of nature, and, finally, renewal.

The Island of Missing Trees

Jenny Odell

We're living on the wrong clock - one that tells us time is money - and it's destroying us. 
 
Here is a radical argument for other ways of experiencing time that offer hopeful possibilities for ourselves and the planet. 
 
Our daily experience is dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside. It wasn't devised for people, but for profit. Saving Time rearranges how we experience time, and imagines a world not centred around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by - inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time. 
 
In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful journey, Jenny Odell takes us through other temporal habitats: as planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal. 
 
She urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms, to imagine a source of meaning outside the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives - or the life of the planet - is not a foregone conclusion. 
 
Now is our moment to rethink. And if we do, time might just save us.

Saving Time

Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

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

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

Charles Foster

A fox, grown strong on pepperoni pizza from the dustbins of the East End, dances along a railway track towards Essex, the territory of wild foxes and wilder huntsmen. 
 
An orca, mourning the loss of her mother in a valley west of Skye, knows that she must now lead the pod as matriarch. She swims again through her childhood, thinking about the old ways, the old roads, laid down thousands of years ago. But the old roads aren't so easy now. 
 
At moonrise in a West Country river, an otter floats slowly downstream. The tide, though it pushes him landwards when it exhales, seems to pull him out when it inhales. He turns on his back. He can see the stars clearly for the first time and wonders if he can swim to them. 
 
The land has never stopped waiting. It has only ever been in exile, right under our noses, waiting to confound, outrage and re-enchant.

Cry of the Wild

Life through the eyes of eight animals

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

Aldo Leopold

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. 
 
In this lyrical meditation on the American wild lands, Leopold considers the different ways humans shape the natural landscape, and describes for the first time the far-reaching phenomenon now known as 'trophic cascades'.

Think Like a Mountain

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

Claire Ratinon

A powerful work of memoir and storytelling that will change the way we think about the natural world. 
 
Like many diasporic people of colour, Claire Ratinon grew up feeling cut off from the natural world. She lived in cities, reluctant to be outdoors and stuck with the belief that success and status could fill the space where belonging was absent. 
 
But a chance encounter with a rooftop farm was the start of a journey that caused her to rethink the life she'd been creating and her beliefs about who she ought to be. Enlivened, she turned her hand to growing food in London before finding herself yearning for a small parcel of land to call her own. 
 
Unearthed tells the story of her leaving the city for the English countryside - and her first garden - in the hope of forging a pathway towards the embrace of the natural world and a sense of belonging cultivated on her own terms. 
 
'Ratinon's story will change hearts and minds' Alice Vincent 
 
'A beautiful book about nature...I recommend it' Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

Unearthed

On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong

Fred Pearce

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Ever wondered if declaring support for fair-trade and then chucking Kenyan beans from your shopping trolley to reduce food miles really added up? Or whether the women in Bangladeshi sweatshops really want you to stop buying the clothes from their sewing machines? Or how the system works when you dump stuff but never buy from a charity shop? 
 
While none of us should stop trying, it was never easy being green. Mindful of his footprint, Fred goes in search of the source of the cotton in his shirt, the prawns in his curry and the people who grew, mined or made all his stuff in an attempt to discover the true story behind our everyday things. This compelling story of his travels moves green thinking on to a new, more sophisticated plane.

Confessions of an Eco Sinner

Travels to find where my stuff comes from

Jonah Mixon-Webster

Lyrical, loud and radically urgent, Jonah Mixon-Webster's debut aims its sights at the words and images that shape us and the corrupt forces that stand in the way of our freedom. Stereo(TYPE) is a reckoning and a force. It is a revision of our most sacred mythologies - and a work of documentary poetry reporting from Mixon-Webster's hometown of Flint, Michigan, where untainted tap water is still not guaranteed and the legacies of racist policies persist. 
 
 Challenging stereotypes through scenes scattered with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster explores the places where space and body, race and region and sexuality and class meet and intersect. He invents visual/sonic forms, recasts poems as FAQs and transcripts, and dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies. Interrogating language and the ways we wield it as both sword and shield, Stereo(TYPE) is a rapturous collection of vital and beautiful poems.

Stereo(TYPE)

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The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

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'At his best, Terry was a teacher': Why we love Terry Pratchett

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