I have reviewed 50 books on this blog this year – a wide-ranging varied selection including many high quality works. If you are looking for a Christmas present for a nature-loving naturalist then this list might give you some ideas and I’ve whittled it down to a shortlist of eight books that most impressed me…
Tag: Nicola Chester
Sunday book review – Ghosts of the Farm by Nicola Chester
Nicola Chester writes superbly well and has a close relationship with the natural world. This book takes the area around the author’s home, and where she grew up, and travels back to the 1940s, war time, to describe the rural community then. Much of the detail comes from the diaries of a woman farmer and…
Sunday book review – The Book of Bogs edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw
This book grew locally in West Yorkshire in response to Walshaw Moor’s landscape and wildlife and to the threat to it from a proposal to build an enormous windfarm on its deep peat soils. But although many of the writings collected here, some previously published elsewhere, relate to this moor, most famously the Wuthering Heights…
Wainwright prize longlists announced
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https://wainwrightprize.com/news/james-cropper-wainwright-prize-2022-longlists-announced/ Here are three interesting lists of books which have been compiled by these three interesting lists of judges. The 2022 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing longlist is: Otherlands: A World in the Making, Dr Thomas Halliday (Allen Lane) 12 Birds to Save Your Life: Nature’s Lessons in Happiness, Charlie Corbett (Penguin) Goshawk Summer:…
This blog’s Books of the Year, 2021
Since my last Books of the Year review I have reviewed a further 50 books – it’s a record! Since these Books of the Year reviews are timed to come out to inform your Christmas book buying there are a few books which were published in 2020 that appear in this list but let’s still…
Stephen Moss’s 2021 Round-up of Nature books.
Stephen Moss is a naturalist, author and course leader of the MA Travel & Nature Writing at Bath Spa University. This year he published Skylarks with Rosie: A Somerset Spring (Saraband) and The Swan: A Biography, (Square Peg). Here is his annual round-up of books about wildlife, nature and the environment. @stephenmoss_tv [Mark writes: where…
Sunday book review – On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester
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This book, subtitled a memoir, is just that. It’s a series of remembrances of events, mostly to do with nature, place, and protest. I loved it. The ‘place’ is that area which includes the sites of the Greenham Common protest and the Newbury bypass protest. The author was involved in both of these, and the…
Sunday book review – Summer edited by Melissa Harrison
It must be summer because I am picking elderflowers from which to make champagne. Spring is over, and if you are a birder then you are now in the position of suspecting that any passage wader on your local patch is already heading south after a nest failure (it’s really already autumn!). This anthology is…
Sunday book review – Spring edited by Melissa Harrison
A collection of writings about spring – what could be nicer? This book is one of four on the seasons. Are there really four seasons, I wonder? I’m not totally sure that summer exists – doesn’t spring (March-June) just fade into autumn (July- December) and then there is a bit of winter (January and February),…