Overview

'This is some of the best English prose of our time' SPECTATOR ‘A feast for mind and soul' ISABELLA TREE 'A marvellous and revelatory guide to our native bird-life' DAILY MAIL Step into the hide for a glorious new encounter with the British wild Close to Adam Nicolson’s home in Sussex, there is a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles. It is the haunt of deer and many birds – nightingales, the occasional cuckoo, ravens, robins, owls and in summer the sweet-singing warblers that come north from Africa to breed in English woods. This gorgeous book charts his attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a marvellous layer of life he had previously almost ignored. He wanted to look and listen, to return to ‘bird school’ and see what it might teach him. He built a small shed amongst the trees with nesting boxes and bird feeders. Cocooned inside, season after season, he got to know the birds: where they nest, how they sing, how they mate and fight, what preys on them, what they are like as living things. Beautifully written and woven through with philosophy, literature, science and a sense of wonder, always conscious that that this is an age in which the natural world is under siege, Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, taking a long, careful and concerned look at our relationship with the wild. 'Golden threads of literary, philosophical and scientific insight run through Nicolson’s book, along with a sense that we are embarking on an adventure with him into a realm that we cannot hope to fully understand' THE TIMES 'A worthy addition to a literary lineage that stretches back to the 18th-century writer and naturalist Gilbert White…Bird School, then, is a fitting title: we should learn to rekindle our enduring love affair with birds, before they vanish from our sight' DAILY TELEGRAPH

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9780008490836

Table of Contents

Reviews

PRAISE FOR ADAM NICOLSON’S LIFE BETWEEN THE TIDES ‘Miraculous … Effortlessly, in deft, sure and delightful prose, he segues through species, science and art to present tidal nature as a microcosm. The result is an utterly fascinating glimpse of a watery world we only thought we knew’ Philip Hoare ‘A beautiful, powerful story of how we understand the unfolding change of the shore. This is a remarkable and powerful book, the rarest of things, both a call-to-arms and a call-to-pause and truly look. Nicolson is unique as a writer, happy soaked to the skin on the shoreline and happy unweaving skeins of philosophy. I loved it’ Edmund de Waal ‘Pure joy. From the ecology of a sandhopper to the cosmic pull of the tides Adam Nicolson takes us paddling into the pools of our own nature … a dazzling, kaleidoscopic exploration into the meaning of life itself’ Isabella Tree ‘A fascinating guide to all things littoral: a natural history of the rockpool that teems with life … Endlessly interesting, its wonders unfurl, fractal-like, the more closely you examine it’ Cal Flyn ‘The man who finds wonder in a winkle … Remarkable … In Nicolson’s hands the intertidal zone is shown to be rich and revelatory … It is as lyrical, learned and rambunctiously eccentric as his previous work … For a book so focused on non-human life, it is luminously humane’ The Times ‘Exquisite … A bravura act of writing … This uniquely and terribly moving book is great literature indeed – reaches beyond itself to speak to us of the most profound and essential things’ Alex Preston, Observer ‘One of our finest writers of non-fiction … Nicolson’s overarching theme in this book … goes to the very heart of what ecology is … the great pleasure of this book is that he does not allow the specifics of his enquiries to keep him from probing the big questions’ Philip Marsden, Spectator

Author Information

Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on at Sissinghust Castle in Kent. His most recent book for HarperCollins is Sissinghurst, a wonderful and personal biography of a place – the story of a heritage, of a vision of connecting once more buildings and garden, fields and farms and of how that dream was realised.

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