The essential and defining new collection of the best British nature writing

`Tim Dee has brought together a wonderous array of talent for this life-affirming, often magical anthology' Observer

We are living in the anthropocene - an epoch where everything is being determined by the activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species.

How do we make our way through the ruins that we have made?

This anthology tries to answer this as it explores new and enduring cultural landscapes, in a celebration of local distinctiveness that includes new work from some of our finest writers. We have memories of childhood homes from Adam Thorpe, Marina Warner and Sean O'Brien; we journey with John Burnside to the Arizona desert, with Hugh Brody to the Canadian Arctic; going from Tessa Hadley's hymn to her London garden to caving in the Mendips with Sean Borodale to shell-collecting on a Suffolk beach with Julia Blackburn.


Helen Macdonald, in her remarkable piece on growing up in a 50-acre walled estate, reflects on our failed stewardship of the planet: `I take stock.' she says, `During this sixth extinction, we who may not have time to do anything else must write now what we can, to take stock.'

This is an important, necessary book.