A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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Sally Huband

WINNER OF THE 2023 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 
 
A WATERSTONES NATURE AND TRAVEL BEST BOOK OF 2023 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT NATURE WRITING PRIZE 2023 
 
'Modern, revealing and restorative, a coastal treasure' Amy Liptrot 
 
'Like its talismanic title, Huband's voice is distinct and singular. A gorgeous reckoning with the sea, islands and mythology' Sinéad Gleeson 
 
'A wild melding of body and landscape. A deep, immersive, storm-tossed read' Helen Jukes 
 
'As vital and complex as the oceans themseleves' Joanna Pocock 
 
A powerful journey of sea and self, trial and hope on the islands of Shetland 
 
On the storm-tossed beaches of the Shetland Archipelago, Sally Huband is searching. A message in a bottle, a mermaid’s purse, a lobster trap tag, each find connects her more deeply with our oceans. But it is Sally’s quest for a fabled sea bean that unlocks the myths of these islands and carries her through chronic illness towards a new and more resilient self.

Sea Bean

Zoe Colville

&lsquo;Funny, gutsy and heartfelt.&rsquo; Daily Mail 
 
Zoë Colville spent years in a fancy hair salon with a long list of clients, living on cigarettes, croissants, and a shoestring. It was everything she'd ever wanted. But when an unexpected and overwhelming loss caused her life to shift unexpectedly, she found herself on a different path. One where the only use for a hairdryer is warming new-born lambs; where the cycle of life on a farm gives new meaning on purpose, and where nature is both a strict teacher and a balm to soothe the pressures of everyday life. 
 
Zoë is now a full-time farmer, business owner and activist. In this memoir, she speaks vivaciously, humorously, and candidly about the lessons learned along the way, from mental health, social media and identity to surviving as an entrepreneur in a shifting economy. And through those lessons - in love, loss, and lambing - discovering something even more important: that it's always the right time to take a bold step and try something new. 
 
'I grab the motionless lamb, which is frighteningly slippery, and scramble on my feet, swinging its little body around to help it breathe. I see its chest move, then it sneezes and starts breathing. It's stunned by the delivery experience. As am I. I'm high on adrenaline. Tears are streaming down my face. I pop the lamb down on the ground and start frantically rubbing its tiny body... Looking back, I can see that this was one of the first moments of questioning whether I'm truly cut out for farming, realising that the answer might be... yes!'

The Chief Shepherdess

Lessons in Life, Love and Farming

Patrick Barkham

Roger Deakin, author of the immortal Waterlog and Wildwood, was a man of many parts: maverick ad-man, cider-maker, teacher, environmentalist, music promoter and filmmaker. But, above all, he was the restorer of ancient Walnut Tree Farm in Suffolk, the heartland where he wrote about all natural life – with rare attention, intimacy, precision and poetry. 
 
Roger Deakin was unique, and so too is this joyful work of creative biography, told primarily in the words of the subject himself, with support from a chorus of friends, family, colleagues and lovers. Delving deep into Deakin’s library of words, Patrick Barkham draws from notebooks, diaries, letters and recordings to conjure his voice back to glorious life in these pages.

The Swimmer

The Wild Life of Roger Deakin

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

Tom Moorhouse

'A necessary nature book, with prose as sharp as prickles' John Lewis-Stempel 
 
In poll after poll hedgehogs come out top as Britain's favourite mammal. And yet their numbers have been in freefall, estimated to have halved in less than twenty years. Why? Who or what is responsible for the disappearance of so many thousands of hedgehogs in recent decades? 
 
Hopeful and informative, in a story full of twists, turns and uncomfortable truths, conservationist Tom Moorhouse explores the trade-offs that exist between humans and wildlife. And, drawing on insights from other hedgehog experts, he hands readers the toolkit necessary to help bring our prickly friends back.

Ghosts in the Hedgerow

A hedghog whodunnit

Greta Thunberg

We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, one of the world's leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen. 
 
You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late. 
 
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried? 
 
We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.

The Climate Book

John Lewis-Stempel

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
 'Lewis-Stempel is one of our finest nature writers ... He writes with delicate observation and authority, giving us in Woodston a book teeming with fascinating details, anecdotes and penetrating insights into the real cost of our denatured countryside.' - Sunday Times 
 
 'The English countryside is 'a work of human art, done by the many and the nameless' and John Lewis-Stempel wanted to celebrate it. He has succeeded admirably.' - Daily Mail 
 _________________ 
 In the beginning was the earth... 
 
 From the Paleozoic volcanoes that stained its soil, to the Saxons who occupied it, to the Tudors who traded its wool, to the Land Girls of wartime, John Lewis-Stempel charts a sweeping, lyrical history of Woodston: the quintessential English farm. 
 
 With his combined skills of farmer and historian, Lewis-Stempel digs deep into written records, the memories of relatives, and the landscape itself to celebrate the farmland his family have been bound to for millennia. Through Woodston's life, we feel the joyful arrival of oxen ploughing; we see pigs rootling in the medieval apple orchard; and take in the sharp, drowsy fragrance of hops on Edwardian air. He draws upon his wealth of historical knowledge and his innate sense of place to create a passionate, fascinating biography of farming in England. 
 
 Woodston not only reminds us of the rural riches buried beneath our feet but of our shared roots that tie us to the land.

Woodston

The Biography of An English Farm – The Sunday Times Bestseller

Jeremy Clarkson

THE NO. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Head back down to Clarkson Farm with the bestseller from our favourite welly-wearing wannabe farmer, Jeremy Clarkson 
___________ 
 
Enthusiastic trainee farmer Jeremy Clarkson made just £144 in his first year at Diddly Squat Farm. This year he's determined to do better. Not because he now knows what he's doing. But because he's fed up of getting stick from Kaleb. 
 
Yet farming continues to be a challenge. 
 
For instance . . . 
· Loading a grain trailer was more demanding than flying an Apache gunship? 
· Cows were more dangerous than motor-racing? 
· It's easier to get planning permission to build a nuclear plant than to turn a barn into a restaurant? 
 
Jeremy's always got a plan. Loads of them. Often cunning. 
 
Not always greeted with wild enthusiasm by Kaleb and Cheerful Charlie, however . . . 
___________ 
 
PRAISE FOR DIDDLY SQUAT 
 
'Clarkson has done more for farmers in one series than Countryfile achieved in 30 years' James Rebanks, author of A Shepherd's Life 
 
'Clarkson has showcased the passion, humour and personalities of the people who work throughout the year to grow the nation's food . . . and brought an understanding of many of the issues faced by farmers to the British public' National Farmers Union 
 
'A deserving Farming Champion of the Year' Farmers Weekly 
 
'I don't know anything about farming. It's like David Attenborough doing jet-skiing, or Nicholas Witchell saying, "I'm going to be a cage fighter'" Jeremy Clarkson 
 
Number 1 Sunday Times bestseller, October 2022

Diddly Squat: ‘Til The Cows Come Home

Raynor Winn

Raynor knows that her husband Moth's health is declining, getting worse by the day. She knows of only one cure. It worked once before. But will he - can he? - set out with her on another healing walk? 
 
Being one with nature saved them in their darkest hour and their hope is that it can work its magic again. As they set out on their incredible thousand-mile journey back to the familiar shores of the South West Coast Path, Raynor and Moth map the landscape of an island nation facing an uncertain path ahead.

Landlines

Everybody thinks they know what sheep are like: they're stupid, noisy, cowardly ('lambs to the slaughter'), and they're 'sheepwrecking' the environment. 
 
Or maybe not. Contrary to popular prejudice, sheep are among the smartest animals in the farmyard, fiercely loyal, forming long and lasting friendships. Sheep, farmed properly, are boons to biodiversity. They also happen to taste good and their fleeces warm us through the winter - indeed, John Lewis-Stempel's family supplied the wool for Queen Elizabeth's 'hose'. 
 
Observing the traditional shepherd's calendar, The Sheep's Tale is a loving biography of ewes, lambs, and rams through the seasons. Lewis-Stempel tends to his flock with deep-rooted wisdom, ethical consideration, affection, and humour. This book is a tribute to all the sheep he has reared and sheared - from gregarious Action Ram to sweet Maid Marion. In his inimitable style, he shares the tales that only a shepherd can tell.

The Sheep’s Tale

The story of our most misunderstood farmyard animal

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’

Tim Birkhead

In Birds and Us, award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on an epic and dazzling journey through this mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to Renaissance experiments on woodpecker anatomy, from Victorian obsessions with egg collecting to the present fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats. 
 
Weaving in stories from his own life as a scientist, including far-flung expeditions to wondrous Neolithic caves in Spain and the bustling guillemot colonies of the Faroe Islands, this rich and fascinating book is the culmination of a lifetime's research and unforgettably shows how birds shaped us, and how we have shaped them.

Birds and Us

A 12,000 Year History, from Cave Art to Conservation

Lee Schofield

It was a tragic day for the nation's wildlife when England's last and loneliest golden eagle died in an unmarked spot among the remote eastern fells of the Lake District., but the fight to restore the landscape had already begun. 
 
Lee Schofield, ecologist and site manager for RSPB Haweswater, is leading efforts to breathe life back into two hill farms and their thirty square kilometres of sprawling upland habitat. 
 
Informed by the land, its turbulent history and the people who have shaped it, Lee and his team are repairing damaged wetlands, meadows and woods. Each year, the landscape is becoming richer, wilder and better able to withstand the shocks of a changing climate. 
 
But in the contested landscape of the Lake District, change is not always welcomed, and success relies on finding a balance between rewilding and respecting cherished farming traditions. This is not only a story of an ecosystem in recovery, it is also the story of Lee's personal connection to place, and the highs and lows of working for nature amid fierce opposition.

Wild Fell

Fighting for nature on a Lake District hill farm

Lucy Cooke

What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again. 
 
Whether it's the female lemurs of Madagascar, dominating the males of their species both physically and politically, the female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii, or the murderous meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert, the bitches in BITCH overturn outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour. 
 
In her trailblazing new book, Lucy Cooke offers a timely look at how sexist bias polluted evolutionary biology and through her riotous cast of bad-ass female animals shows the scientific patriarchy what's what.

Bitch

What does it mean to be female?

A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal

Thomas Halliday

This is the past as we've never seen it before. 
 
Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. 
 
Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record. 
 
Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

Otherlands

A World in the Making

Patrick Roberts

Jungle is a new and ambitious history of the world, telling the remarkable story of the world's tropical forests from the arrival of the first plants millions of years ago to the role of tropical forests in the evolution of the world's atmosphere, the dinosaurs, the first mammals and even our own species and ancestors. Highlighting provocative new evidence garnered from cutting-edge research, Dr Roberts shows, for example, that our view of humans as 'savannah specialists' is wildly wrong, and that the 'Anthropocene' began not with the Industrial Revolution, but potentially as early as 6,000 years ago in the tropics. We see that the relationship between humankind and 'jungles' is deep-rooted, that we are all connected to their destruction, and that we must all act to save them. Urgent, clear-sighted and original, Jungle challenges the way we think about the world - and ourselves.

Jungle

How Tropical Forests Shaped World History

How Tropical Forests Shaped World History – and Us

Tom Chivers

'A lyrical meditation on landscapes and cities, vivid reportage and a memoir. And also a beautifully realised and moving read.' Financial Times 
 
'A beguiling mix of history, geology, folklore and memoir that captivated me from the first page.' Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking 
 
'Tom Chivers brings a poet's sensibility to this book about the hidden parts of the capital, mixing the past with the present, the known with the unknown and his personal story with social history and geology.' Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other 
 
What secrets lie beneath a city? 
 
Tom Chivers follows hidden pathways, explores lost islands and uncovers the geological mysteries that burst up through the pavement and bubble to the surface of our streets. From Roman ruins to a submerged playhouse, from an abandoned Tube station to underground rivers, Chivers leads us on a journey into the depths of the city he loves. 
 
A lyrical interrogation of a capital city, a landscape and our connection to place, London Clay celebrates urban edgelands: in-between spaces where the natural world and the metropolis collide. Through a combination of historical research, vivid reportage and personal memoir, it will transform how you see London, and cities everywhere. 
 
'Tom Chivers, with the forensic eye of an investigator, the soul of a poet, is an engaging presence; a guide we would do well to follow.' Iain Sinclair, author of The Last London

London Clay

Journeys in the Deep City

Pull on your wellies, grab your flat cap and join Jeremy Clarkson in this hilarious and fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the infamous Diddly Squat Farm 
 
THE NO. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'Brilliant . . . laugh-out-loud' Daily Telegraph 
'Outrageously funny . . . will have you in stitches' Time Out 
_________ 
 
Welcome to Clarkson's farm. 
 
It's always had a nice ring to it. Jeremy just never thought that one day his actual job would be 'a farmer'. 
 
And, sadly, it doesn't mean he's any good at it. 
 
From buying the wrong tractor (Lamborghini, since you ask . . .) to formation combine harvesting, getting tied-up in knots of red tape to chasing viciously athletic cows, our hero soon learns that enthusiasm alone might not be enough. 
 
Jeremy may never succeed in becoming master of his land, but, as he's discovering, the fun lies in the trying . . . 
_________ 
 
'Very funny . . . I cracked up laughing on the tube' Evening Standard 
 
Praise for Clarkson's Farm: 
 
'The best thing Clarkson's done . . . it pains me to say this' GUARDIAN 
 
'Shockingly hopeful' INDEPENDENT 
 
'Even the most committed Clarkson haters will find him likeable here' TELEGRAPH 
 
'Quite lovely' THE TIMES 
 
Diddly Squat, Number 1 Sunday Times bestseller, October 2022

Diddly Squat

A Year on the Farm

Chris Terrill

65,000 tons. 280 metres long. A flight deck the size of sixty tennis courts. HMS Queen Elizabeth in the biggest ship in the Royal Navy's history. 
 
 But it's her ship's company of 700, alongside an air group of 900 air and ground crew that are Big Lizzie's beating heart. From before the first steel of her hull was cut, Chris Terrill has enjoyed unprecedented access to Queen Elizabeth and the men and women who have brought her to life. 
 
 How to Build an Aircraft Carrier tells the story of Britain at her best: innovative, confident, outward-looking and world beating.

How to Build an Aircraft Carrier

The incredible story behind HMS Queen Elizabeth, the 60,000 ton star of BBC2’s THE WARSHIP

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

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

Suzanne Simard

Raised in the hardy forest communities of British Columbia, scientist Suzanne Simard overturned conventional beliefs in proving that trees and plants are connected underground by an immense web of fungal mycelia, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that sustain the forest. 
 
Finding the Mother Tree is the story of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees: their perceptions, behaviours, healing capacities, language, memory and wisdom. Simard's landmark work has been immensely influential, revealing the complex cycle of forest life - on which we rely for our existence - and offering profound lessons about resilience and kinship.

Finding the Mother Tree

Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest

Charlie Corbett

Recognising his perspective on life was slipping following his mother's untimely death, Charlie turned to the rhythms of the natural world for comfort and solace - in particular its birds. He found that through reconnecting with the wildlife all around him, the grief that once felt insurmountable he could now overcome. 
 
His memoir is a heartfelt ode to the birds that helped him through the darkest of times, exploring in beautiful, lyrical detail this journey of rediscovery, and shows us there is joy to be found in the smallest of events, if we know where to look, and to listen.

12 Birds to Save Your Life

Nature's Lessons in Happiness

Jonathan C. Slaght

The forests near to where Russia, China and North Korea meet in a tangle of barbed wire are the only place on earth where brown bears, leopards and tigers co-exist. They are also home to one of nature's rarest birds, the Blakiston's fish owl. A chance encounter with this huge, strange bird was to change wildlife researcher Jonathan Slaght's life beyond measure. During the following two decades, Slaght's quest to safeguard the elusive owl from extinction took him over thousands of miles of forbidding and threatened terrain. Thrilling and inspiring, his book is a beautifully crafted meditation on the natural world and what it means to devote one's career to a single pursuit.

Owls of the Eastern Ice

The Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl

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

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. 
 
 In these interwoven essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. 
 
 Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as within the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Gathering Moss

A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Nature holds the answers for Raynor and her husband Moth. After walking 630 homeless miles along The Salt Path, living on the windswept and wild English coastline; the cliffs, the sky and the chalky earth now feel like their home. 
 
Moth has a terminal diagnosis, but against all medical odds, he seems revitalised in nature. Together on the wild coastal path, with their feet firmly rooted outdoors, they discover that anything is possible. 
 
Now life beyond the Salt Path awaits and they come back to four walls, but the sense of home is illusive and returning to normality is proving difficult - until an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story changes everything. 
 
A chance to breathe life back into a beautiful farmhouse nestled deep in the Cornish hills; rewilding the land and returning nature to its hedgerows, becomes their saving grace and their new path to follow. 
 
The Wild Silence is a story of hope triumphing over despair, of lifelong love prevailing over everything. It is a luminous account of the human spirit's instinctive connection to nature, and how vital it is for us all.

The Wild Silence

Laurence C. Smith

Rivers have opened frontiers, defined borders, supported trade, generated energy and fed billions. Most of our greatest cities stand on river banks or deltas, and our quest for mastery has spurred staggering advances in engineering, science and law. Rivers and their topographic divides have shaped the territories of nations and the migration of peoples, and yet - as their resources become ever more precious - can foster cooperation even among enemy states. And though they become increasingly domesticated, they remain a formidable global force: these vast arterial powers promote life but are capable of destroying everything in their path. 
 
From ancient Egypt to our growing contemporary metropolises, Rivers of Power reveals why rivers matter so profoundly to human civilization, and how they continue to be indispensable to our societies and wellbeing.

Rivers of Power

How a Natural Force Raised Kingdoms, Destroyed Civilizations, and Shapes Our World

Jay Griffiths

Why rebel? 
 
Because our footprint on the Earth has never mattered more than now. How we treat it, in the spirit of gift or of theft, has never been more important. 
 
Because we need a politics of kindness, but the very opposite is on the rise. Libertarian fascism, with its triumphal brutalism, its racism and misogyny - a politics that loathes the living world. 
 
Because nature is not a hobby. It is the life on which we depend, as Indigenous societies have never forgotten. 
 
Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars, and they are lining up now to write rebellion across the skies.

Why Rebel

Alan Booth

One sunny spring morning in the 1970s, an unlikely Englishman set out on a pilgrimage that would take him across the entire length of Japan. Travelling only along small back roads, Alan Booth travelled on foot from Soya, the country's northernmost tip, to Sata in the extreme south, traversing three islands and some 2,000 miles of rural Japan. His mission: 'to come to grips with the business of living here,' after having spent most of his adult life in Tokyo. 
 
The Roads to Sata is a wry, witty, inimitable account of that prodigious trek, vividly revealing the reality of life in off-the-tourist-track Japan. Journeying alongside Booth, we encounter the wide variety of people who inhabit the Japanese countryside - from fishermen and soldiers, to bar hostesses and school teachers, to hermits, drunks and the homeless. We glimpse vast stretches of coastline and rambling townscapes, mountains and motorways; watch baseball games and sunrises; sample trout and Kilamanjaro beer, hear folklore, poems and smutty jokes. Throughout, we enjoy the wit and insight of a uniquely perceptive guide, and more importantly, discover a new face of an often-misunderstood nation.

The Roads to Sata

A 2000-mile walk through Japan

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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