Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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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

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

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

Jonathan Weiner

This is one of the easiest-to-read, most exciting books on evolution of the past twenty years. It describes evolution happening before our eyes among the isolated bird populations of the Galapagos - the very finches observed by Darwin on his Beagle voyage - and its heroes are an unsung British couple. It is uncannily fascinating to imagine the beak of the finch changing in our lifetime in response to evolutionary pressure. . . .

The Beak Of The Finch

Ian McEwan

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: his wife is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster.

Solar

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

Mark Cocker

'After Mark Cocker’s glorious book, you will never look at a blackberry bush the same way again.' 
Philip Hoare, New Statesman 
 
In 2001 Mark Cocker moved to Claxton, a small village in Norfolk. In a series of daily writings spanning the course of a year he explores his relationship to the landscape he lives in, to nature and to all the living things around him - the birds, plants, trees, mammals, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, bush crickets, grasshoppers, ants and bumblebees. Passionate, astonishing and inspiring, this book is a celebration of the wonder that lies in our everyday experience. 
 
Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Biology Book Award, the Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards, the New Angle Prize and theThwaites Wainwright Prize

Claxton

Field Notes from a Small Planet

Kapka Kassabova

‘A classic for our times’ MONIQUE ROFFEY 
 
‘Haunting, beautiful… Anima will live with me for a long time’ CAL FLYN 
 
'A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIAN 
 
Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe. 
 
She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community. 
 
Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human–animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living – one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world. 
 
‘An extraordinary work of exploration, both inner and outer. It should be required reading for everyone thinking about our human environment: which is to say, all of us’ THE TABLET

Anima

A Wild Pastoral

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

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