After the well-deserved success of Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, it’s not surprising that this year’s crop of nature books is packed with examples of the new nature writing. This category encompasses everything from “wild memoirs” to travel books, and poetic journeys to polemics.
One publisher is currently dominating the genre. Bloomsbury has always had a good reputation for natural history reference books, under the expert guidance of the recently retired Nigel Redman, and it has now branched out into more narrative works. Written by an eclectic set of scientists, naturalists and TV presenters, these retail between £14.99 and £16.99 – good value for such well-produced hardbacks. Two TV presenters have compiled their collected columns: the eponymous Bill Oddie Unplucked, and David Lindo’s guide to urban birding, Tales from Concrete Jungles. Both are light but very enjoyable reads, as is The Shark and the Albatross (Profile), a look behind the scenes by wildlife cameraman John Aitchison.
Other entertaining Bloomsbury titles include Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells, by Helen Scales; Few and Far Between: On the Trail of Britain’s Rarest Animals by Charlie Elder; and House Guests, House Pests: A Natural History of Animals in the Home by Richard Jones. On a more serious theme, there’s The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream by Katharine Norbury. Following a miscarriage, the author walks the length of the River Humber with her nine-year-old daughter. Profound and moving, yet uplifting too.
Mark Avery’s Inglorious: Conflict in the Uplands, also from Bloomsbury, is a powerful indictment of the grouse-shooting industry and its illegal shooting and propaganda war against the hen harrier. This complements two fine books from other publishers, Michael McCarthy’s elegiac The Moth Snowstorm (John Murray) and Tony Juniper’s What Nature Does for Britain (Profile), which both deal with the bigger picture of environmental decline. All three authors ask serious questions of our hopelessly myopic politicians, and suggest practical measures that would make the world a much better place.
Travel and nature writing are becoming increasingly blurred at the edges – conveniently for me, as I have just started teaching a master’s degree in both at Bath Spa University. So I enjoyed two new “natural travelogues”: 60 Degrees North (Polygon), in which the young Shetland author Malachy Tallack circumnavigates the globe at the same line of latitude as his home, and Donald S Murray’s Herring Tales (Bloomsbury). Also based in Shetland, Murray is one of my favourite writers in any genre, and this quirky book on how the “silver darlings” shaped human taste and history doesn’t disappoint. Equally idiosyncratic is Magnus Robb’s Undiscovered Owls (Sound Approach), which reveals the remarkable discovery of a new species of owl in the wilds of Arabia.
Closer to home, journeys are mapped out by two of our leading nature writers. Paul Evans’s Field Notes from the Edge (Rider) and Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (Hamish Hamilton) explore Britain’s landscape through metaphor and language, and will appeal to the many of their fans who have rediscovered their own connection with the land through their writings. Meanwhile, the man who started it all off, Richard Mabey, returns with The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination (Profile), a brilliantly written tour de force on what plants mean to us.
The Collins New Naturalist series celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, and continues to enthral, with three volumes by experts in their field: Lakes, Loughs and Lochs by Brian Moss; Yorkshire Dales by John Lee; and the mammoth Alien Plants by Clive A Stace and Michael J Crawley, the latter surely the definitive word on this fascinating subject. To accompany the series, Collecting the New Naturalists by Tim Bernhard and Timothy Loe contains everything you could ever want to know about collecting these classic books.
Another epic series continues with volume five of the Handbook of the Mammals of the World (Lynx), on monotremes and marsupials, an authoritative and endlessly fascinating guide to these bizarre creatures. More budget-conscious readers will enjoy the latest batch of volumes in Reaktion’s excellent and varied Animal series: Badger, Mouse, Goat, Skunk, Swallow and – by Desmond Morris – Bison, which are packed with fascinating social history and culture as well as natural history.
Three titles top my list of the best nature books of 2015. In third place, Nick Davies’s Cuckoo: Cheating By Nature (Bloomsbury), the perfect combination of science and folklore. This leaves two books on butterflies, both by men of a certain age for whom butterfly collecting was a childhood pastime, and who now pursue these ephemeral insects in more wholesome ways. Both Peter Marren’s Rainbow Dust (Square Peg) and Matthew Oates’s In Pursuit of Butterflies (Bloomsbury) reveal the fascinating world of these winged jewels, and complement each other perfectly.
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