The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh
Review by Peter Reason When I was a small child at primary school, we celebrated Empire Day. Children were invited—expected—to take a Union Flag to school and wave it around….
Orchard: A Year in England’s Eden by Benedict Macdonald & Nicholas Gates
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Bristol friends and BBC colleagues Ben Macdonald and Nick Gates set out to chronicle a year in the life of a traditional Herefordshire orchard that has…
The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Review by Peter Reason This book offers a revision of our understanding of human cultural history, and so opens possibilities for different, maybe more creative and liberating, arrangements for contemporary…
Light Rains Sometimes Fall: A British Year Through Japan’s 72 Seasons by Lev Parikian
Review by Liz Dexter “For Japan’s lotus blossom, praying mantis and bear, we have bramble, wood louse and urban fox” Lev Parikian, a writer, birdwatcher and conductor, had already started…
Two nature memoirs set in the New Forest: Goshawk Summer by James Aldred & The Circling Sky by Neil Ansell
By Rebecca Foster Two recent memoirs have shone a spotlight on the fauna and management strategies of the New Forest, a place my Hampshire-raised husband and I have often visited…
The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, by Simon Morden
Review by Annabel Who hasn’t been enthralled by the idea of there being ‘Life on Mars’ even if said life ends up as the first humans to visit the red…
Architecture, Homes & Gardens
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
A Tomb With a View by Peter Ross
Reviewed by Gill Davies Just a few days ago my partner and fellow Shiny reviewer Basil Ransome Davies found a new walk to do in these times of Covid-inspired local…
Smoke Hole: Looking to the wild in the time of the Spyglass by Martin Shaw
Review by Peter Reason Martin Shaw is a mythologist, storyteller, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide, a teacher of mythic imagination. Should you encounter him at a workshop, you will most likely…
On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason
Translated by Lytton Smith Review by Peter Reason This book focuses on two things that are changing beyond recognition in this era of rapid ecological change: Time and Water. Time…
The Nightingale: Notes on a songbird, by Sam Lee
Review by Peter Reason Sam Lee is a renowned song collector, interpreter, and singer of folk songs from Britain and Ireland; he has an abiding interest in wilderness studies and…
Field Work: What Land Does to People and What People Do to Land by Bella Bathurst
Review by Liz Dexter “This place, this land, wasn’t a job or a business: it was everything – past and future, identity and rhythm, daily bread and Sunday rest.” Reading…
Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
Review by Peter Reason Elizabeth Kolbert is a celebrated American journalist, staff writer for the New Yorker. Her work focuses unflinchingly on the ecological challenges of our time, as can…
Digging up Britain: A New History in Ten Extraordinary Discoveries by Mike Pitts
Reviewed by Liz Dexter “Who are we? Where do we come from? What is Britain, and what does it mean to be British?” This book opens eerily similarly to Sathnam…
Notes From Deep Time: A journey through our past and future worlds by Helen Gordon
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Deep time has been a persistent theme in British nonfiction over the last couple of years, showing up in books like Time Song by Julia Blackburn,…
Biography & Memoir, Diaries
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Review by Peter Reason I have been totally absorbed in Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places since it arrived in the morning mail and I read in the Preface: ‘The right…
The Fresh and the Salt: The Story of the Solway by Ann Lingard
Reviewed by Peter Reason When I was a small boy—and this memory must reach back to around 1950—I played with a wooden puzzle made up of the historic counties of…
The Stubborn Light of Things by Melissa Harrison & The Consolation of Nature by Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott & Peter Marren
By Rebecca Foster The Stubborn Light of Things collects five and a half years’ worth of Melissa Harrison’s monthly Nature Notebook columns for The Times. The book falls into two…
Fifty Words for Snow by Nancy Campbell
Reviewed by Liz Dexter I greatly enjoyed reading Nancy Campbell’s meditation on the icy places of the world, The Library of Ice. last year, so when I was alerted that…
Wintering: A Season With Geese by Stephen Rutt
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Stephen Rutt and his partner move to Dumfries, to a flat near the Solway Firth, just as he’s finishing writing his first (wonderful) book The Seafarers…
Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal by Sarah Maslin Nir
Review by Liz Dexter Sarah Maslin Nir is a staff reporter for the New York Times who, by her own admission, has sought out horses wherever she’s travelled to write…
Riders on the Storm: The climate crisis and the survival of being by Alastair McIntosh
Review by Peter Reason Alastair McIntosh is a Scottish Quaker, peace, community and environmental writer and campaigner, maybe best described as a spiritual activist. He is a fellow and former…
The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes
Reviewed by Liz Dexter A book that is in turns entertaining, lyrical and shocking, you won’t think about the countryside – or the rivers – of England in quite the…
Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures by Merlin Sheldrake
Review by Peter Reason Entangled Lives by Merlin Sheldrake has been greeted with much enthusiasm, not least by Robert Macfarlane in the New Yorker. I am sure I am not…
Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Ever since I read Findings sometime around a decade ago I’ve viewed anything with Kathleen Jamie’s name attached to it with interest and it’s probably fair…