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

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Gerald Durrell

‘Another tiger-golden day lay ahead of us. It was as though England had never really existed’ 
 
The Durrell clan’s escapades on their Greek island home resume with the second volume of the Corfu Trilogy. Budding zoologist Gerald continues to explore the natural wonders around him, enjoying a night fishing trip, receiving a donkey as a birthday present and accidentally bringing a bear home for tea. Here too are more stories of the eccentric creatures he calls his family, including Margo’s ill-advised foray into spiritualism and what becomes known as ‘Mother’s Great Romance’. Ending as the Second World War is declared, Birds, Beasts and Relatives is an enchanting return to a magical place.

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

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‘Living in Corfu was rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas’ 
 
It is 1935 and the Durrells have escaped the leaden summer skies of Bournemouth to arrive ‘like a troupe of medieval tumblers’ on the sun-drenched island of Corfu for a new life. Gerald Durrell’s beloved portrayal of his chaotic family – beatific Mother, Roger the dog, diet-obsessed Margo, book-loving Lawrence and gun-wielding Leslie – as well as his own adventures with a burgeoning menagerie of beasts, birds and insects (including an owl called Ulysses), is a timeless account of an idyllic childhood and an uproarious portrait of the English abroad.

My Family and Other Animals

‘My collection of animals swelled to a point where even Mother occasionally grew alarmed’ 
 
The island of Corfu, where the Durrell family live in agreeable chaos, is paradise for aspiring naturalist Gerald. His battalion of creatures has grown to include eleven puppies, a toad named Dierdre and an unwelcome infestation of scorpions. Yet the human visitors to their sun-drenched villa are even more curious, whether it is an innocent pair of American painters ripe for practical jokes, or a supercilious Count who barely survives an outing on Gerald’s home-made boat, the Bootle-bumtrinket. The third volume in the Corfu Trilogy brings this glorious tale of halcyon days to a close.

The Garden of the Gods

W. H. Hudson

Considered a classic at the time of its publication in 1910, A Shepherd's Life is a rare account of the lives of those who lived on and worked the land in nineteenth-century rural Britain. A masterful work of prose, W. H. Hudson focuses on the story of one man, a Wiltshire shepherd named Caleb Bawcombe, whose tales of sheep dogs, farmer's wives, poachers and local fairs become a sublime account of a way of life that has largely disappeared from these shores.

A Shepherd's Life

James Lovelock

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. 
 
James Lovelock's We Belong to Gaia draws on decades of wisdom to lay out the history of our remarkable planet, to show that it is not ours to be exploited - and warns us that it is fighting back. 
 
Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

We Belong to Gaia

W. N. P. Barbellion

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The young naturalist W. N. P. Barbellion described this remarkably candid record of living with multiple sclerosis as 'a study in the nude'. It begins as an ambitious teenager's notes on the natural world, and then, following his diagnosis at the age of twenty-six, transforms into a deeply moving account of battling the disease. His prose is full of humour and fierce intelligence, and combines a passion for life with clear-sighted reflections on the nature of death. 
 
Barbellion selected and edited this manuscript himself in 1917, adding a fictional editor's note announcing his own demise. This Penguin Classics edition includes 'The Last Diary', which covers the period between submission of the manuscript and Barbellion's actual death in 1919.

The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Ronald Blythe

This colourful, perceptive portrayal of English country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants, from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by, to the concerns of a younger generation of farm-workers and the fascinating and personal recollections of, among others, the local schoolteacher, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate. Providing insights into farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared.

Akenfield

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