Occasionally, a book seems to massively widen your comprehension of the world, and this one does that with every chapter.
An exploration of the mycelial entanglement under our feet that shapes life, breath, our thoughts, and our future. Every change of perspective and scale is astounding; I’ll never look at a mushroom, or anything in the woods that it converses with, in the same way again.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
Jake Thackray is an almost forgotten figure, but he was a national treasure in the 70s and 80s and an utterly unique singer-songwriter in the French chanson tradition of Georges Brassens.
He was a proud Yorkshireman and English teacher, and his love of language and dialect infuses his comic songs with a complexity and specificity you rarely hear now. He was a nervous performer, a drinker, and a hard man to pin down.
Still, his songs are amongst the best, most technically accomplished, and brilliantly observed of anything in the English canon, and he deserves to be rediscovered. This book is a detailed and moving portrait of a great eccentric talent.
Beware of the Bull - The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray is the critically-acclaimed first biography of the late, great singer-songwriter. Admired by Neil Gaiman, Jarvis Cocker, Alex Turner and Thea Gilmore, among others, Jake was one of the greatest and most original artists of the twentieth century; a unique talent and master storyteller whose songs are full of wit, poetry, irreverence and humanity. The book reveals a life as extraordinary as his writing: difficult upbringing in the terraces of Leeds; strict Catholic education; transformative experiences in France and Algeria; time as an inspirational, unorthodox and highly creative teacher; meteoric…
This is the only book I remember reading as a child, and I couldn’t recall much about it except that it made a strong impression at the time.
Reading it again this year, forty years on, it is a breathlessly exciting and deeply moving account of the life of the riverbank, infused with local language and practice, sharp as any of the brilliant current crop of nature writers in its observational eye for detail, and hard as nails on the raw cycle of life and death in Tarka’s life.
The naming of the animals is the only element that points to its young reader origins, but this is a great book to rediscover as an adult. It brings into sharp relief the way a book’s emotional impact changes between the contexts of childhood and later life experience.
"Twilight over meadow and water, the eve-star shining above the hill, and Old Nog the heron crying kra-a-ark! as his slow dark wings carried him down to the estuary."
A beautiful hardback gift edition of one of the most famous animal stories in children's literature. TARKA THE OTTER is the classic story of an otter living in the Devonshire countryside which captures the feel of life in the wild as seen through the otter's own eyes. The story's atmosphere and detail make it easy to see why Tarka has become one of the best-loved creatures in world literature.
