Reading Nature

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin's emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother's brain...At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son's ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers's most intimate and moving novel.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science.As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers.Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, she shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.Endorsements"A mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose." — Publishers Weekly"Anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love it." — Library Journal"Takes 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

"We should have known the end was near."So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company.Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle would last for decades and come at a steep price.Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.Endorsements"The unforgettable story of a community on the wrong end of Western greed, How Beautiful We Were will enthrall you, appall you, and show you what is possible when a few people stand up and say this is not right. A masterful novel by a spellbinding writer engaged with the most urgent questions of our day." — David Ebershoff, bestselling author of The Danish Girl

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut.A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.These four, and five other strangers – each summoned in different ways by trees – are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us.This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A smog has spread. Food crops are disappearing. A chef escapes her career in London to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles. There, her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch and her own body.In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and seductive violence, the chef's boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in alluring language, Land of Milk and Honey is a striking novel about food, sex and the intricacies of desire and longing.A rapturous novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the worldEndorsements"A rich novel of ideas" — The Guardian"A tasty treat" — iNews"A genius balance of page-turning and lyrical prose" — The Independent"A sharp, sensual piece of art. When I read I'm always searching for pleasure, for the want, and this book helped me feel something" — Raven Leilani"It's rare to read anything that feels this unique. A richly imagined, ambitious, and haunting novel" — Gabrielle Zevin"Truly exceptional" — Roxane Gay"A blazing writer" — Daisy Johnson"Truly gifted" — Sebastian Barry"An arrestingly original writer" — The Sunday Times

A mountain of flesh she is, this Decima, as she lies. She summons her strength to rise, all four feet on sand and shale. Puffs twirl and settle as her toes find their place. Three on each foot. Decima stands.In the veld of the Eastern Cape a writer imagines Decima – a magnificent black rhinoceros cow. Mother to Tandeka, herself plumped up with calf, Decima and her crash of rhinos await the birth of the new baby. Decima still recalls how she became an orphan many seasons ago, and tension mounts with the passing of each full moon.Conjuring up the life of Decima is Eben. How do you write about this animal as a sentient being? He wants to find out. With the story of the rhino matriarch and her kin comes the various characters who impact their poachers, their clients, those who practise traditional medicine, and those whose calling it is to protect the animals. Entwined in Eben’s work on the rhino is an account of his fragile, ageing mother. But ringing loudest in his ear is the voice of Decima.Eben Venter’s book, a creative blend of autofiction, animal fable, mystery and scientific enquiry, is an urgent plea to save one of earth’s megaherbivores. An elegiac work for numerous voices, Decima is a moving and thrilling lament to loss in all its many guises.

The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain — and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away.Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from cutting-edge research, Adam Welz brings us close to species like the moose of Northern Maine, the parrots of Puerto Rico, Namibia's cheetahs, and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic.An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanizes us to act in defense of the natural world before it's too late.A revelatory exploration of climate change from the perspective of wild species and natural ecosystems — an homage to the miraculous, vibrant entity that is life on Earth.

In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the 'Knepp experiment', a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife.Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy clay of their land at Knepp was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell made a spectacular leap of faith: they decided to step back and let nature take over. Thanks to the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer — proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain — the 3,500-acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade.Extremely rare species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of other species are rocketing. The Burrells' degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life — all by itself.Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope. Personal and inspirational, Wilding is an astonishing account of the beauty and strength of nature, when it is given as much freedom as possible.EndorsementsWinner of the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize.Highly Commended by the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize.'A passionately personal, robustly argued and uplifting book . . . One of the landmark ecological books of the decade.' — Sunday Times 'Books of the Year'

Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception.For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people but also with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patterns) that we have only lately come to think of as inanimate. How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth?In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which—even at its most abstract—echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.EndorsementsWinner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction

The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. They can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature's processes. In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake takes us on a mind-altering journey into their spectacular world, and reveals how these extraordinary organisms transform our understanding of our planet and life itself.The smash-hit Sunday Times bestseller that will transform your understanding of our planet and life itself.Endorsements'Astonishing ... it seems somehow to tip the natural world upside down' — Observer'Completely mind-blowing ... reads like an adventure story' — Sunday TimesWinner of the Royal Society Book Prize 2021Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing 2021Dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing — Robert MacfarlaneUrgent, astounding and necessary — Helen MacdonaldGorgeous! — Margaret Atwood (on Twitter)Wonderful — Nigella Lawson'This book is like one surprise after another' — David ByrneUplifting — Jeanette WintersonShortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2021Selected as a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Times, Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday, BBC Science Focus and Time

Award-winning broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough and longtime collaborator Colin Butfield present a powerful call to action focused on our planet's oceans, exploring how critical this habitat is for the survival of humanity and the future of Earth.Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, Ocean uncovers the mystery, the wonder and the frailty of the most unexplored habitat on our planet — and the one which shapes the land we live on, regulates our climate and creates the air we breathe. The book showcases the oceans' remarkable resilience: they are the part of our world that can—and in some cases have—recovered the fastest, if we only give them the chance.Drawing a course across David Attenborough's own lifetime, Ocean takes readers on an adventure-laden voyage through eight unique ocean habitats, through countless intriguing species, and through the most astounding discoveries of the last 100 years to a future vision of a fully restored marine world, even richer and more spectacular than we could possibly hope for. Ocean reveals the past, present and potential future of our blue planet. It is a book almost a century in the making but one that has never been more urgently needed.

A Wilder Way is a memoir of a relationship with an ever-changing garden, of setting down roots and becoming embedded in nature, and of how tending to a patch of land will not only grow us as individuals, but can also help to grow a better world.Join Poppy Okotcha in her wild little garden in Devon, where, over the course of a year, she shares the inspiring, the mundane and the magical moments that arise from tending a garden through the seasons, and what they can teach us about living more sustainably.Alongside tips for sowing and growing, wild ingredients to be found and delicious seasonal recipes to make, she shows us how the small joys of engaging with the natural world are imperative for our physical and emotional wellbeing. How the more we look at the world around us, the more we learn and the more we care. Woven throughout are personal stories, exploration of environmental issues facing us today, and folktales from her English and Nigerian heritage – stories with nature at their heart that have inspired her, and will inspire us to live a little more wildly.With original illustrations from Frances WhitfieldEndorsements"A wise, passionate, heartfelt book. An invaluable resource for those seeking greater attunement with the year's cycles." — Katherine May"I learnt so much, about the alchemy of the living world and the possibilities of relationship. I finished the book newly awestruck by planet Earth and all the life that she carries. Beautifully written, nourishing, evocative and inspiring." — Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden"Poppy's fresh-eyed look at her own little corner of the county gave me a renewed sense of wonder and delight at the joys and challenges of loving and (on good days) living off a small patch of land. Plus some truly brilliant ideas for getting the most from it." — Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall"This is an intimate look at building a true relationship with a garden and all that live in it. Practical, poetic, political — like the best conversations over tea in the garden." — Alys Fowler

Women have always gardened, but our stories have been buried with our work. Alice Vincent is on a quest to understand what encourages women to go out, work the soil, plant seeds and nurture them, even when so many other responsibilities sit upon their shoulders. To recover the histories that have been lost among the soil and to understand women’s lives, their gardens and what the ground has offered them.Wise, curious and sensitive, Why Women Grow follows Alice in her search for answers, with inquisitive fronds reaching and curling around the intimate anecdotes of others.

At the heart of Is a River Alive? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings, who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of the ancient, urgent concept.Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognize the lives and the rights of rivers, and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. The young "rights of nature" movement has lit up activists, artists, law-makers and politicians across six continents—and become the focus for revolutionary thinking about rivers in particular.The book flows like water, from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by Canadian gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to northeastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river—the Mutehekau or Magpie—is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader called Rita Mestokosho.From the celebrated writer, observer and naturalist Robert Macfarlane comes a brilliant, perspective-shifting new book, which answers a resounding "yes" to the question of its title. Is a River Alive? is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. A clarion call to re-centre rivers in our stories, law and politics, it invites us to radically re-imagine not only rivers but life itself. At the heart of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end. This happened to me.When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself the custodian of a newborn hare. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival.Raising Hare chronicles their journey together and the challenges of caring for the leveret and preparing for its return to the wild. We witness an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife.This improbable bond of trust serves to remind us that the most remarkable experiences, inspiring the most hope, often arise when we least expect them.

A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future.A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of plants and people, from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed, to those vilified but intimate, like soy, and to those, like kelp, on which our futures depend. The plants in this collection are perceived as being ‘out of place’—weeds, samples collected through imperial science, and crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land, but often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there. Starting with Rebecca Smith’s own family history – foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal – Rural is an exploration of our green and pleasant land, and the people whose labour has shaped it.Beautifully observed, these are the stories of professions and communities that often go overlooked. Smith shows the precarity for those whose lives are entangled in the natural landscape, and she traces how these rural working-class worlds have changed. As industry has transformed – mines closing, country estates shrinking, farmers struggling to make profit on a pint of milk, holiday lets increasing so relentlessly that local people can no longer live where they were born – we are led to question the legacy of the countryside in all our lives.This is a book for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's petroleum industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.A stunning account of the colossal wildfire at Fort McMurray, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.EndorsementsNamed a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, TIME, The Globe and Mail, The New Yorker, Financial Times, CBC, Smithsonian, Air Mail Weekly, Slate, NPR, Toronto Star, The Washington Post, The Times, and Orion Magazine.

No matter where we live, “we are all ocean people,” Helen Scales emphatically observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomize today’s increasingly challenging conditions. Ocean life everywhere is on the move as seas warm, and warm waters are an existential threat to emperor penguins, whose mating grounds in Antarctica are collapsing. Shark populations—critical to balanced ecosystems—have shrunk by 71 per cent since the 1970s, largely the result of massive and often unregulated industrial fishing. Orcas—the apex predators—have also drastically declined, victims of toxic chemicals and plastics with long half-lives that disrupt the immune system and the ability to breed.Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations. Amazing seagrass meadows and giant kelp forests rivaling those on land are being regenerated and expanded. They may be our best defense against the storm surges caused by global warming, while efforts to reengineer coral reefs for a warmer world are growing.Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.

Charles Foster wanted to know what it was like to be a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, a swift. What it was really like. And through knowing what it was like he wanted to get down and grapple with the beast in us all.So he tried it out; he lived life as a badger for six weeks, sleeping in a dirt hole and eating earthworms. He came face to face with shrimps as he lived like an otter, and he spent hours curled up in a back garden in East London and rooting in bins like an urban fox.A passionate naturalist, Foster realises that every creature creates a different world in its brain and lives in that world. As humans, we share sensory outputs, lights, smells and sound, but trying to explore what it is actually like to live in another of these worlds, belonging to another species, is a fascinating and unique neuroscientific challenge.For Foster it is also a literary challenge. Looking at what science can tell us about what happens in a fox's or badger's brain when it picks up a scent, he then uses this to imagine their world for us, to write it through their eyes or rather through the eyes of Charles the beast.An intimate look at the life of animals, neuroscience, psychology, nature writing, memoir and more, it is a journey of extraordinary thrills and surprises, containing wonderful moments of humour and joy, but also providing important lessons for all of us who share life on this precious planet.EndorsementsLonglisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2016.

One night Mark Cocker followed the roiling, deafening flock of rooks and jackdaws which regularly passed over his Norfolk home on their way to roost in the Yare valley.From the moment he watched the multitudes blossom as a mysterious dark flower above the night woods, these gloriously commonplace birds were unsheathed entirely from their ordinariness. They became for Cocker a fixation and a way of life.Cocker goes in search of them, journeying from the cavernous, deadened heartland of South England to the hills of Dumfriesshire, experiencing spectacular failures alongside magical successes and epiphanies. Step by step he uncovers the complexities of the birds' inner lives, the unforeseen richness hidden in the raucous crow song he calls 'our landscape made audible'.Crow Country is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing. It is also a reminder that 'Crow Country' is not 'ours': it is a landscape which we cohabit with thousands of other species, and these richly complex fellowships cannot be valued too highly.

With an introduction by Robert Macfarlane.I had attached myself to the birds. I couldn't move on until the birds moved on, and the birds couldn't move on without the spring. One winter, after an enforced period of recuperation, William Fiennes finds himself restless and yearning for adventure. He travels to Texas, where he begins a quest to trace the million-strong flocks of snow geese making their spring flight thousands of miles north to the Arctic tundra. On his epic journey he meets people from every walk of life, from ex-nuns to train fanatics, and their stories resound with the longing to arrive at the right place in the world.A unique blend of autobiography, travel and nature writing, this is a classic tale of belonging and the inescapable lure of home.EndorsementsShortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.Winner of the Hawthornden Prize.

The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay, Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England.Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today.Mama, the author’s grandmother, is a central protagonist of the story. Alongside her, herbalists, plant workers, farmers, and plant lovers help forge an intimate portrait of Coffee Grove, as do the plants themselves; fever grass, jointa, search mi heart, leaf of life, helping Allen-Paisant revise his sense of self and solidify a new understanding of his place in the world.The Possibility of Tenderness is a cross-pollinating book about the transformative power of plants, the legacy of dreams, and the lessons they offer for living with the earth.Endorsements'An extraordinary, necessary book' — Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland'Strangely restorative and tenderly written. Hold it in your hands and then dream of the green world' — Monique Roffey, author of Passiontide'This book is a triumph' — Professor Corinne Fowler, author of Our Island Stories'An unforgettable read' — Tice Cin, author of Keeping The House'Profound and lyrical' — Ekow Eshun, author of The Strangers

We are all in need of lights to follow.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 Eider 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. She replied, 'Bring work clothes and good boots.' By then 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, building little wooden huts that will protect the ducks come spring; to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for the woman to gather, like feathered gold.Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not at all what he had previously thought. As the weeks pass, what began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.

'A garden contains secrets, we all know buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .'In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of the garden, not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.Endorsements'What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.' — Nigel Slater

In May 2022, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences released a paper that measured fourteen European countries on three factors: biodiversity, wellbeing, and nature connectedness. Britain came last in every single category. The findings are clear. We are suffering, and nature is too.Enter 'Wild Service' – a visionary concept crafted by the pioneers of the Right to Roam campaign, which argues that humanity's loss and nature's need are two sides of the same story. Blending science, nature writing and indigenous philosophy, this groundbreaking book calls for mass reconnection to the land and a commitment to its restoration.In Wild Service, we meet Britain's new nature defenders: an anarchic cast of guerrilla guardians who neither own the places they protect, nor the permission to restore them. Still, they're doing it anyway. This book is a celebration of their spirit and a call for you to join.So, whether you live in the countryside or the city, want to protect your local river or save our native flora, this is your invitation to rediscover the power in participation – the sacred in your service.

From a fearless, internationally acclaimed activist, We Will Be Jaguars is an impassioned memoir about an indigenous childhood, a clash of cultures, and the fight to save the Amazon rainforest and protect her people.Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest—one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s—Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. She played barefoot in the forest and didn’t walk on pavement, or see a car, until she was a teenager and left to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. But after Nemonte’s ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture, she listened.Nemonte returned to the forest and traditional ways of life and became one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. She spearheaded an alliance of Indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and led her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting over a half million acres of primary rainforest.We Will Be Jaguars is an astonishing memoir by an equally astonishing woman. Nemonte digs into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, and hacking away at racist notions of Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, she reveals a life story as rich, harsh, and vital as the Amazon rainforest herself.