Everyone likes Olive Piper. A happy, open-hearted child growing up in the 1950s, her life is contented. When her passion for reading gets her into university she feels sure the world is waiting for her. But then she makes a mistake - the kind any one of us could make - and faces an impossible choice.

The poet George Crabbe (1754 - 1832), best known as the author of Peter Grimes and The Village, was also a surgeon, a clergyman, a botanist, and a novelist.

**New York Times bestseller**A Guardian / Observer Book of the YearWhen powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking 'Roman' names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan.

In the light of these happy coincidences, Greenery recounts how Tim Dee tries to travel with the season and its migratory birds, making remarkable journeys to keep in step with the very best days of the year, the time of buds and blossoms and leafing, the time of song and nests and eggs.

'The best of these Darwins is that they are cut out of rock - three taps is enough to convince one how immense is their solidarity.' So wrote Virginia Woolf affectionately of Gwen Raverat, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin. In this first full biography, Frances Spalding looks beyond the artist Gwen Raverat's childhood memoir;