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Shalimar: A Story of Place & Migration by Davina Quinlivan
I wasn't sure what to expect with Shalimar: A Story of Place & Migration, the wonderful debut novel from author Davina Quinlivan. I've read a fair bit on areas such as…
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The Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century
The Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century delivers what it promises and more. Like so many other recent publications it has its genesis in the Covid crisis. At…
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Riding Jane Crow by Miriam Thaggert
Everyone loves a good train story. Not only do they merge the limitless feeling of traveling by locomotive with the very real anxieties that can pervade a closed cabin, but they…
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Finding The Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
The Yucatan jungle is on either side of the road as I finish reading Finding the Mother Tree. Throughout my four-hour journey through the Mexican south, I’ve been idly looking…
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Aurochs and Auks: Essays on Mortality and Extinction by John Burnside
This book is not an easy read. This is probably as it should be, given the subject material – the death of the individuals, species and the planet, and the…
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The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse
In her wonderful book, The Ghost in the Garden: in Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden, author Jude Piesse observes that gardens have the unique distinction of being created by people as…
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I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain
Anita Sethi begins her book I Belong Here with an account of racial abuse. Travelling on the TransPennine Express train, a man insults her, saying, amongst other things too vile…
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The Turkish Embassy Letters
To say these are a collection of the best letter writing of the eighteenth century really would be understating the importance and brilliance of The Turkish Embassy Letters. A collection…
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Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes
In Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he remarks that the permanence of a mountain seems to structure our understanding of the natural world, thereby conditioning the eye…
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A Thing of Beauty
I’d been looking forward to reading Peter Fiennes’ new book A Thing of Beauty since its first mentions on social media, having read and reviewed its wonderful predecessor Footnotes (2019,…