A journey into nature's stories

A swift flies two million kilometres in its lifetime. That’s far enough to get to the moon and back twice over – and then once more to the moon. A pangolin keeps its tongue furled in a pouch by its hip. A Greenland shark can live for five hundred years.

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. An illustrated collection of the lives of some of the Earth’s most astounding animals, The Golden Mole is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck – to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness.

Farm animals are familiar to us from childhood, but little did we know that their inner lives are full of complexity, deep bonds and family dramas. Rosamund Young has been an organic farmer for over 40 years and this is her record of a life at the beck and call of the animals while observing and preserving the abundant wildlife at Kite’s Nest Farm. It is a story of joy, discovery, cooperation and sometimes heartbreak. We learn about sheep growing old disgracefully, the intelligence of supposedly ‘bird-brained’ hens, ‘conversations’ between cows and why you should never send a text while milking. 

In Ten Birds that Changed the World, naturalist and author Stephen Moss tells the gripping story of this long and eventful relationship through ten key species from all seven of the world’s continents. From Odin’s faithful raven companions to Darwin’s finches, and from the wild turkey of the Americas to the emperor penguin as a potent symbol of the climate crisis, this is a fascinating, eye-opening and endlessly engaging work of natural history.

Historian Matthew Green travels across Britain to tell the forgotten history of our lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages. 

Revealing the extraordinary stories of how these places met their fate – and exploring how they have left their mark on our landscape and our imagination – Shadowlands is a deeply evocative and dazzlingly original account of Britain’s past.

For three years, Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she created a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. 

The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic — they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists – and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way

Feeling bone-tired, anxious and overwhelmed by the rolling news cycle and the pandemic age, Katherine May seeks to unravel the threads of a life wound too tightly. Could there be another way to live – one that feels more meaningful, more grounded in the places beneath our feet?

In Enchantment, May explores the restorative properties of the natural world and begins to rekindle her sense of wonder. It is a journey that takes her from sacred wells to wild moors, from cradling seas to starfalls. Through deliberate attention and ritual, she finds nourishment and a more hopeful relationship to the world around her.

A Londoner for over twenty years, moving from flat to Tube to air-conditioned office, Melissa Harrison knew what it was to be insulated from the seasons. Adopting a dog and going on daily walks helped reconnect her with the cycle of the year and the quiet richness of nature all around her: swifts nesting in a nearby church; ivy-leaved toadflax growing out of brick walls; the first blackbird’s song; an exhilarating glimpse of a hobby over Tooting Common.

Moving from scrappy city verges to ancient, rural Suffolk, where Harrison eventually relocates, this diary – compiled from her beloved Nature Notebook column in The Times – maps her joyful engagement with the natural world and demonstrates how we must first learn to see, and then act to preserve, the beauty we have on our doorsteps – no matter where we live.

From peregrine falcons nesting by the Thames to a conversation with Sir David Attenborough; from protests against the HS2 railway to an encounter with Britain’s last lion tamer, this collection – drawn from twenty years’ worth of Patrick Barkham’s writing for the Guardian – forms a joyful, fascinating and enlightening chronicle of one of the nation’s most celebrated nature writers. 

Wild Green Wonders paints a portrait of contemporary wildlife, bearing witness to the many changes imposed upon the planet and the challenges lying ahead for the future of nature

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