This is a radical new look at the Common Swift - a numerous but profoundly un-common bird - by Charles Foster, author of the New York Times Bestseller, Being a Beast. Foster follows the swifts throughout the world, manically, lyrically, yet scientifically.

This book tells the story of Quinlivan's Anglo-Asian family whose extraordinary mythology haunts her own sense of time and place over the course of ten years and seven house moves through England, finally settling in rural Devon with a young family of her own.

Like the six sides of a snowflake, the book has six chapters which explore the art, literature and science of snow, as well as Marcus Sedgwick's own experiences and memories.

In the winter of 1705 the young Johann Sebastian Bach, then unknown as a composer, set off on a long journey by foot to Lubeck, a distance of more than 250 miles. This journey was a pivotal point in the life of the great composer. In Something of his Art, Horatio Clare follows in his footsteps.

Acutely sensitive to rhythms of the countryside, Edward Thomas's lyrical, passionate, and sometimes political writing merges natural history with folk culture, and gives us a free-form record of the feelings and observations of one of the great poets of the English language. First published 1909 by J.M. Dent & Sons

Set in Kent, the author returns to those trees of his youth to breath life into the changing character of a single woodland year. He reveals how precious they are to the English countryside.

As lyrical and precise as Fowles' novels, The Tree is a provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity, and also a rejection of the idea that nature should be tamed for human purpose.

Traces the course of a spring which rises on an Iron Age hillfort and gradually broadens into a brook, flows through a nearby village and hamlet, skirts a solitary farmhouse and its orchard, before draining into water meadows and a lake where the wildfowl nest. This book presents the details of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats.