Category Archives: Travel Guides
The Foundling Boy
It is 1919. On a summer`s night in Normandy, a new-born baby is left in a basket outside the home of Albert and Jeanne Arnaud. The childless couple take the foundling in, name him Jean, and decide to raise him as their own, though his parentage remains a mystery. Though Jean`s life is never dull,
Farmer`s Glory
First published in 1932 and written in simple, direct prose, Farmer`s Glory is a portrait of a farming life in southern England and in western Canada, and is a model of the genre: warm and humorous as well as an astute and unflinching account of the hardships of a farming life. Introduced, in this new,
The Islands
Buenos Aires, 1992. Hacker Felipe Felix is summoned to the vertiginous twin towers of magnate Fausto Tamerlan and charged with finding the witnesses to a very public crime. Rejecting the mission is not an option. After a decade spent immersed in drugs and virtual realities, trying to forget the freezing trench in which he passed
Beyond the Fell Wall
Richard Skelton spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern England. When not writing or composing music, most of his days were spent beating the valley`s bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams and walls. Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his
Happiness Is Possible
Happiness is Possible tells the story of a writer late delivering his novel, unable to write anything uplifting since his wife walked out. All he can produce is notes about the happiness of others. But something draws him into the Moscow lives around him, bringing together lonely neighbours, restoring lost love, and helping out with
Cornerstones: Subterranean writings; from Dartmoor to the Arctic Circle
Although mostly concealed, our bedrock geology profoundly determines what we see around us – not just our landforms, but the built environment too, from Aberdeen, often called the “granite city” to Bath, constructed from honey-coloured limestone- rocks shape the world around us. In Cornerstones, some of Britain`s leading landscape and nature writers consider their relationship
Ridge and Furrow
In his haunting debut, `Water and Sky`, published in 2014, Neil Sentance explored the history of his family and the landscape which shaped them. `Ridge and Furrow` continues the project to chart in prose the voices of a seldom recorded people and place. From the long shadows of war and want, to facing the great
The Ancient Woods of Helford River
The Helford River, Cornwall is a place of wonder and delight: one of the very few places in England where ancient woodland meets the sea.”This is oak country, and the oaks have that surprising variety of size and shape that only Cornwall and Devon oaks can offer. Smooth wooded hillsides, subtly mottled with the different
Copsford
Walter Murray was a young man tired of living in the city. Early in the 1920s, he persuaded a Sussex farmer to rent him a derelict cottage, which stood alone on a hill, with no running water or electricity. Most of the windows were broken, it was dirty, dark and ran with rats. He bought
Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach
In the depths of winter in 1705 the young Johann Sebastian Bach, then unknown as a composer and earning a modest living as a teacher and organist, set off on a long journey by foot to Lubeck to visit the composer Dieterich Buxterhude, a distance of more than 250 miles. This journey and its destination
Diary of a Young Naturalist
Winner of the 2020 Wainwright PrizeSome signed copies available (while stocks last)Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of 15-year-old Dara McAnulty`s world. From spring and through a year in his home patch in Northern Ireland, Dara spent the seasons writing. These vivid, evocative and moving diary entries about his connection to wildlife and
The Screaming Sky: Shortlisted for the 2021 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing
Shortlisted for the 2021 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature WritingSwifts live in perpetual summer. They inhabit the air like nothing on the planet. They watched the continents shuffle to their present places and the mammals evolve. They are not ours, though we like to claim them. They defy all our categories, and present no passports
The Long Field: A Memoir
`The Long Field` burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell how this small country became a big part of an American writer`s life. Petro, author of `Travels in an Old Tongue`, twines her story around that of Wales by viewing both through the lens of hiraeth, a quintessential Welsh word famously hard to translate.
Where?
In 2017, Simon Moreton`s father fell suddenly ill and died. His death sent the author back to his childhood home in rural Shropshire trying to process his grief by revisiting his family`s time as transplants to the countryside. The story centres around Titterstone Clee Hill, and Caynham, the nearby village in which the author lived
Nature Cure
Signed by the authorTo 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
Down the Rabbit Hole
Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a cartel, and Tochtli
The Fat of the Land
In the 1970s, John Seymour`s book, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency was a huge, international best-seller, inspiring a new generation to “down-shift” to a new way of life. The book has remained in print ever since. But years earlier, Seymour had written and published The Fat of the Land, telling of how he and
All the Lights
A man bets all he has on a horserace to pay for an expensive operation for his dog. A young refugee wants to box her way straight off the boat to the top of the sport. Old friends talk all night after meeting up by chance. She imagines their future together…Stories about people who have
My House of Sky
Since his rise to fame in 1967 when his work “The Peregrine” was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, J A Baker has captured the popular imagination with his vivid descriptions of British landscapes and native wildlife. Compelling, strange and at times both startlingly funny and cruel, Baker`s prose is at one with his image
