Michael Viney and his wife Ethna lived in the city, had successful jobs in the media and had just turned forty when they made a life-changing decision: to give up everything for a self-reliant existence on a remote cottage farm in County Mayo, on the West Coast of Ireland. This enchanting chronicle of life on the land follows the highs and lows of one year in the Irish countryside. Since then, for sixty years, Michael Viney's weekly columns in The Irish Times have established his reputatio...

Ireland conjures up images of nature's majesty: sweeping coastlines, rolling green hills, and secluded peat bogs and marshlands. A place of legendary beauty, it is also a land with a rich natural history. Michael Viney invites us to discover the geologic forces that created the island, peer into the famous bone caves that hold unique clues about animals from long ago, and experience the dramatic scenes of the cliff-lined coast and tempestuous seas.Viney begins deep in the past, whe...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER & BEST GARDENING BOOKS OF 2020 - Sunday Times'Every page a joy' NIGEL SLATER'From a very early age I loved the countryside as much as any garden and was fascinated by the life that I saw all around me from trees, wildflowers, birds, insects and mammals. In a sense this book has been over sixty years in gestation. I have kept notebooks and journals ever since I could w...

From The New York Times bestselling author of Is A River Alive and Underland, an "eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we're laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth's surface." --Bill McKibbenWinner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and a finalist for the Orion Book AwardAre there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is ...

T he New York Times–bestselling author of H is for Hawk explores the human relationship to the natural world in this "dazzling" essay collection ( Wall Street Journal).In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asle...

Deep Country is Neil Ansell's account of five years spent alone in a hillside cottage in Wales.'I lived alone in this cottage for five years, summer and winter, with no transport, no phone. This is the story of those five years, where I lived and how I lived. It is the story of what it means to live in a place so remote that you may not see another soul for weeks on end. And it is the story of the hidden places that I came to call my own, and the wild crea...

'Evocatively written and charming' - Countryfile'The January Man is a book that makes you want to pull on your boots, grab a map and get out there' - Country LifeThe January Man is the story of a year of walks that was inspired by a song, Dave Goulder's 'The January Man'. Month by month, season by season and region by region, Christopher Somerville walks the British Isles, following routes that con...

A wonderful meditation on the English landscape in wet weather by the acclaimed novelist and nature writer, Melissa Harrison.Whenever rain falls, our countryside changes. Fields, farms, hills and hedgerows appear altered, the wildlife behaves differently, and over time the terrain itself is transformed.In Rain, Melissa Harrison explores our relationship with the weather as she follows the course of four rain showers, in four seasons, across Wicken Fen, Shropshire, ...

THE TIMES NATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019!Shortlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize!Shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Award 2019!If you enjoyed Raynor Winn's The Salt Path, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, Chris Packham's Fingers in the Sparkle Jar or Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk, you'll love The Easternmost House.Within the next few months, Juliet Blaxland's home will be demolished, and the land where it now stands will crumble into the North Sea. In her numbered days living in t...

"This wonderful collection of wildlife encounters will make anyone want to pull on their boots and re-discover the world on our doorsteps."—Kate Humble, TV host & authorFor the last thirty years, naturalist John Lister-Kaye has taken the same circular walk from his home deep in a Scottish glen up to a small hill loch. Each day brings a new observation or an unexpected encounter—a fragile spider's web, an osprey struggling to lift a trout from the water or a woodcock...

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Vibrant, fascinating, poetic - a year in living things: all the things we love, all the things we wish we could, all the little things we step over and never know - the best of British wildlife from two superb naturalists and writers' CHRIS PACKHAMFrom blackbirds, beavers and beetles to tawny owls, natterjack toads and lemon slugs. Every day of the year, winter or summer, in every corner of the Bri...

Collected observations and essays on the English countryside and its flora and fauna from an award-winning novelist.