Greenery: Journeys in Springtime by Tim Dee (2020)
Review by Rebecca Foster From the Cape of Good Hope to the Arctic Circle, Dee tracks the spring as it travels north. From first glimpse to last gasp, moving between…
Art & Design, Craft & Photography
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
Non Fiction
Travel & the World
Tracks: Walking the Ancient Landscapes of Britain by Philip Hughes
Softback review by Liz Dexter This quietly stunning book will appeal to anyone interested in art, landscape, walking, geology, geography, maps and ancient monuments. Deceptively simple paintings reveal both the…
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier
Review by Peter Reason In 2013, a spring storm uncovered, on the shores of Norfolk, the oldest traces of humanity discovered outside Africa: fossil footprints made by early humans 850,000…
Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Back in early March, just before literary events started being cancelled due to coronavirus, I had the good fortune to see Lucy Jones at Hungerford Town…
The Birds They Sang: Birds and People in Life and Art by Stanisław Łubieński
Translated from Polish by Bill Johnston Review by Peter Reason Stanisław Łubieński first began observing birds in childhood through Soviet binoculars. Later, he took his hobby to a more serious…
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Review by Peter Reason There has been a lot of interest recently in the idea of ‘rewilding’, expressed for example in Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The return of nature to a…
Red Sixty Seven, curated by Kit Jewitt
Review by Peter Reason When I was a small boy, back in the 1950s, I remember going on Sunday School trips to the seaside. Once we were out of London,…
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud
Review by Peter Reason I have on my desk three pieces of rock, collected during my ecological pilgrimage on in the west coast of Scotland, that I wrote about in…
The Summer Isles by Philip Marsden
Reviewed by Peter Reason The Summer Isles is an account of a single-handed voyage from the south coast of England round the west of Ireland and on to the northwest…
Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie
Review by Peter Reason Kathleen Jamie is primarily known as a poet, but her prose writing is eagerly anticipated and widely acclaimed. Surfacing is the third in a loose trilogy…
Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places by Julian Hoffman
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster More so than ever, I’m convinced that the purpose of literature is to educate us about the most pressing issues that we face as a species….
The Seafarers: A Journey Among Birds by Stephen Rutt
Review by Liz Dexter This charming and perceptive book opens with a gut-wrenching account of taking off in a Very Small Plane from Kirkwall in Orkney, travelling to North Ronaldsay….
The Dinosaurs Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting History by Michael J Benton
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Michael J. Benton is Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology and head of the Palaeontology Research Group at the University of Bristol, so you can be sure he…
The Frayed Atlantic Edge by David Gange
Reviewed by Peter Reason David Gange is historian at the University of Birmingham and a passion for mountains and wild water. Well before The Frayed Atlantic Edge was published, I…
This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
Edited by: Farrell, Clare, Alison Green, Sam Knights, and William Skeaping Review by Peter Reason There cannot be many followers of Shiny New Books who are not aware of the…
Birds in the Ancient World by Jeremy Mynott
Review by Liz Dexter Jeremy Mynott is both a classical scholar and a writer on birds, and his love and deep knowledge of both areas shine through in this fascinating…
The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology by Mark Boyle
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster It’s common practice nowadays, when publicizing a book review published in an online venue, to tag the author on social media. Provided I’ve been able to…
Horizon by Barry Lopez
Review by Peter Reason Barry Lopez is one of the greats of ‘nature writing’ (although he dislikes the term, as it seems do most ‘nature writers’!). He is most widely…
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
Review by Peter Reason I am approaching my seventy fifth birthday. As I look back, I see my life has been overshadowed by the gathering ecological catastrophe. I have a…
Europe: A Natural History by Tim Flannery
Review by Peter Reason A natural history, Tim Flannery tells us, encompasses both the natural and the human worlds. This book attends to three big questions: How was Europe formed?…
Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky
Review by Peter Reason I am not sure how I came across this book; I think I followed a link on Twitter. It appealed to me immediately appealed and ordered…
Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place by Benjamin Myers
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Benjamin Myers has been having a bit of a moment. In 2017 Bluemoose Books published his fifth novel, The Gallows Pole, which went on to win…
Eye of the Shoal by Helen Scales
Reviewed by Annabel In her third book, Helen Scales tuns her attention to another branch of the marine tree of life with each book. She began with the small genus…
The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places by William Atkins
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster When I saw him introduce The Immeasurable World as part of the Faber Spring Party, William Atkins characterised it as being in “the old-fashioned travel writing…