Nature has been a source of play, exploration, community, and solace for me since I was very young – as an adult, I find myself fascinated and alarmed by our species’ relations with the living world. Nature writing gives me a way of bringing my attention to this relationship and exploring it in a very close way. I often think of that well-worn phrase: We cannot protect what we do not love; we cannot love what we do not know. Literature, it seems to me, offers one route to better knowing and loving the world.
It began as I was entering my thirties and feeling disconnected in my life. Then friends gave me the gift of a colony of honeybees—according to folklore, bees freely given bring luck—and I embarked on my first full year of beekeeping. But what does it mean to "keep" wild creatures? In learning about the bees, what can I learn of myself?
As I grappled with my role in the delicate, awe-inspiring ecosystem of the hive, the very act of keeping seemed to open new perspectives, deepen friendships, old and new, and make the world come alive. My book is a fascinating exploration of the honeybee and the hive and a beautiful meditation on responsibility and care, vulnerability and trust, forging bonds, and breaking new ground.
It’s no understatement to say that this book changed my life. I read it when I was living in London, and feeling very far from my rural, outdoorsy roots. Richard Mabey is considered one of Britain’s greatest living nature writers, and I think the label is absolutely accurate. In this book, he describes an episode of depression and how he slowly rediscovered a living connection with his surroundings.
This book showed me how literature can sometimes bring us closer to the natural world, helping us to articulate and explore our relationship with living things. It made me want to write!
To celebrate Richard Mabey's 80th birthday, a reissue of the seminal Nature Cure, originally published in 2005 to great acclaim.
At the height of his career, having recently published Flora Britannica, the author and naturalist fell in to a deep and all consuming depression. Unable to rise from his bed, his face turned to the wall, Richard Mabey found that the touchstones of his life - his love for nature and the land - could no longer offer him solace. But over time, with help from friends and a move to East Anglia, he slowly recovered, finding a new partner,…
This book charts a series of journeys along ancient tracks, holloways, and drove-roads. I found it a hugely immersive, surprisingly exhilarating read – I loved how Macfarlane brought a very detailed, lucid, and embodied mode of narration to travels that were often unexpected and strange.
As he walks, we hear stories of ghosts, pilgrims, songs, and their singers – it’s a book about people as much as places, and as I read, I gained a powerful sense of how, as humans, we’re shaped, made, and remade, by the landscapes we move through.
The acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland examines the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move
Chosen by Slate as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years
In this exquisitely written book, which folds together natural history, cartography, geology, and literature, Robert Macfarlane sets off to follow the ancient routes that crisscross both the landscape of the British Isles and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the voices that haunt old paths and the stories our tracks tell. Macfarlane's journeys take…
I must have read this book hundreds of times! I teach it to creative writing students every year, and every year, I find some new connection or detail I hadn’t noticed before.
Jamie has such an unusual, peculiarly alive connection to her surroundings. She describes landscapes that are local to her – a curious combination of domestic and wild spaces and a beautifully subtle mode of narration.
It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer.
Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern…
I found this a profoundly moving book. Late Light describes the author’s own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England, as he finds strange parallels opening up between his own life and the lives of the "unloved" animals he encounters.
Malay’s voice is intelligent, questioning, gentle, and meditative – quietly, movingly, he asks questions that reach through to the heart of what it means to be alive today.
'Late Light brings the refreshing perspective of someone who goes from seeing England as a foreign place to someone who deeply studies its secret wonders. An astonishing read.' - Amy Liptrot, The Outrun
This is a book about falling in love with vanishing things
Late Light is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. It…
Most people have heard of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but her other books—including this one from her sea trilogy—are lesser known. The Edge of the Sea is a luminous, precise, and exquisite book, and since reading, I haven’t been able to look at a coastline without being reminded of it.
Carson explores the sea’s edge as a liminal, constantly shifting place. Her scientific knowledge creates a detailed sense of its meaning and detail, and her poetic, vital prose is a joy to read. Carson clearly loves what she writes about, and her passion is infectious!
In The Edge of the Sea Rachel Carson introduces us to the 'strange and beautiful place' where the sea meets the land. She explores a tide pool, an inaccessible cave, and watches a lone crab on the shore at midnight. From these, and other, encounters she offers us not just a scientifically accurate study of the ecology of the seashore, but also a hauntingly beautiful account of the fragile balance of life found at the edge of the sea.
The Edge of the Sea, like all her writing, sounds a prophetic alarm for the damage mankind is doing to the…
A spy school for girls amidst Jane Austen’s high society.
Daughters of the Beau Monde who don’t fit London society’s strict mold are banished to Stranje House, where the headmistress trains these unusually gifted girls to enter the dangerous world of spies in the Napoleonic wars. #1 NYT bestselling author Meg Cabot calls this exciting historical series "completely original and totally engrossing."
A School for Unusual Girls is the first captivating installment in the Stranje House series for young adults by award-winning author Kathleen Baldwin. #1 New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot calls this romantic Regency adventure "completely original and totally engrossing."
It's 1814. Napoleon is exiled on Elba. Europe is in shambles. Britain is at war on four fronts. And Stranje House, a School for Unusual Girls, has become one of Regency England's dark little secrets. The daughters of the beau monde who don't fit high society's constrictive mold are banished to Stranje House to be reformed into marriageable young…
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