4 out of 5 stars

Leif Bersweden has been fascinated by wild plants for as long as he can remember. As a child, he would spend his afternoons collecting the various leaves and flowers that he found. Being given a digital camera meant that he could collect a digital record and he would then fill notebooks with his findings.

It was this fascination that led to a degree in biology and now a PhD from Kew on orchids. He has never fallen out of love with our green friends and have already been to various parts of the country with the intention of finding orchids he wanted to see for himself other plants in their location. He brogan this trip though in London with his mum looking for plants that were flowering on the 1st of January 2021.

It is the start of a journey that will take him from Ireland discovering mosses to Shetland seeking the mouse ear. He travels back to his original home in Wiltshire walking the paths of his childhood to the Fens where he was searching for lilies and cycles the south downs at peak bluebell time. The trips to see these plants and many many others took place over the year, the various travel restrictions and lockdowns meant that rather than it being some sort of grand plant tour, it was a series of shorter journeys written up as essays.

I really liked this, not only is he really knowledgeable, but what comes across is his enthusiasm. It is infectious to reading this makes me want to go and discover what is out in my local patch! He is utterly besotted by plants and this is evident in his prose and the pictures included in his book of him, especially when he gets to hold a bladderwort.

One of the main things that he is trying to show in this book is that some of the plants that he goes to see are extremely threatened by climate change and human actions. I liked that sometimes he is in a spot to see a very rare and specific plant and more importantly sometimes he is there just because being in the natural world is equally important. It is a good follow-up to his first book, The Orchid Hunter and can recommend reading it. Even better each of the plants that he mentions in the book can be seen on this website:

https://www.wherethewildflowersgrow.co.uk/

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

I am not going to go into too much detail in this review as revealing too much information about these two short stories in this slender volume will probably spoil it for others.

In the first short story, Jacobé is looking after a young lad called Minguet while his parents are at work. It is a common thing that happened and the girl would always be called his teta. She still cares deeply for him even though he is a young man now and the story explores the relationship they had.

In the second story, a girl called Fineta is waiting by the beach for her father and brothers to return from their fishing trip. As she looks out to see she can’t see their sail on the horizon, but she is not alone. A man that is known locally as the Woodsman is walking past. She returns home as she does not like the man before coming back to the beach. When she returns later he is still there…

The writing in both stories is sharp and sparse, it is quite amazing what he can convey in such few words. He manages to convey with tiny details in the prose just what the landscape is like and the emotional turmoil that the characters are suffering from. If you like your short stories short and espresso in intensity, give this a go.

4 out of 5 stars

Working on oil rigs is a physical and demanding job, and the rigs off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea are some of the toughest. Just getting there is a challenge, especially in the winter storms where the men are often stuck there for much longer than their standard three weeks.

Tabitha Lasley had just quit her job at a women’s magazine and escaped a grim relationship. She wanted to realise her idea about writing a book about the men who live and work on these rigs, and to answer this question: “I wanted to see what men were like, with no women around.”

This book is her answer to that question.

It is not a passive view either, she questions over 100 men, and becomes heavily involved with one, falling into a toxic affair that takes up a lot of the book. She is a very good writer as she immerses you in the world she has joined, but it is very intense at times and mirrors how the men are after they have come off the rig. Definitely worth reading but might not be for everyone.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

It is 1973 and Civil Townsend, who has just qualified from Nursing Scholl wants to make a difference in the world. She joins the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, where she intends on helping the women of her community make choices for their bodies and lives. But this is not what she finds is happening.

Some of her first patients are two girls aged 11 and 13. They are not sexually active yet and have no interest in boys anyway, but according to the people handling their welfare benefits, they are a priority case for birth control. She is very hesitant about administering a new drug when she hears that it hasn’t been fully tested yet and tries to find another way of helping the girls.

She befriends the family and tries to help them in various ways with housing and other things. One day she arrives at the house to find that they have been collected and taken to hospital. She jumps in her car and heads straight there, only to find out that she is too late and that the thing that she dreaded most happening to them has taken place.

She complains to her boss and is relieved of her duties. The case though is picked up by a young lawyer and then slowly gains nationwide interest even with the politicians in Washington DC. The case consumes all her time and emotional energy and she knows whatever the judgement is will set legal history, but she knows that nothing will ever be the same again for any of them.

Perkins-Valdez has written a really powerful story about another horrific piece of American history. Her fictional characters are inspired by those affected in the real story behind this, but she has fleshed out the narrative and weighted the prose with emotion. Again it is not normally a book that I would pick up normally, but it arrived in a box with some others and I thought that it was worthy of my time. I wasn’t wrong. If there was one flaw, I didn’t like the parallel timeline I the book, I would have preferred the earlier story and then the follow-up story. If you liked The Help then I have a feeling that you’d like this too.

4 out of 5 stars

The Island of Corfu has a long and sometimes bloody history. For the past 2000 years, it has absorbed elements of its culture from the surroundings and then made them its own. The Durrells are now linked with the island after Lawrence persuaded his mother to move there with his siblings prior to World War II.

You don’t get much of Durrell in this book, rather you get a series of profiles and vignettes about the people and the island written in a diary form. He weaves together a history of the people and the place as well as an insider’s perspective of life on the island. My favourite chapter was the one titled Landscape with Olive Trees, this tells how the people live and we get to meet the Count and man who still observes the pagan practices that the Orthodox Church has still not banished from the island.

It is the sweetest of the island waters, because it tastes of nothing but the warm afternoon, the breath of the cicadas, the idle winds crisping at little corners of the inert sea, which stretches away towards Africa, death-blue and timeless.

This is a beautifully written book about the wonderful island of Corfu. I was fortunate enough to be on the island whilst reading this too. A lot has changed since Durrell was there and wrote these words, but a lot has stayed the same too. The people are still warm and welcoming, the landscape is still sun-drenched and the silvery leaves of the olive trees still shimmer in the wind and the sea glistens in the sun. I haven’t read any of his fiction books yet, only a couple of his non-fiction and this is really good. If you are unable to visit this place for whatever reason, let this book take you there in an instant.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Stepping outside her comfort zone of a quiet life on the island of Orkney and heading to Berlin, Amy Liptrot is in search of new experiences and literary inspiration and also for love. Once there she rents a small bedroom in a loft and immerses herself in city life.

The process of trying to find love and companionship is much more complex nowadays, dating apps give a glimpse into the digital shadows that people leave online. But she is there for the natural world too, following the cycles of the moon in each of the short chapters of the book as well as learning how to spot the goshawks that inhabit the city. She also spends hours out at night and very early in the morning searching for the racoons that live there too.

But this is a brief memoir about love too. She finds a man over there and they fall for each other in an intense way. Her future is changing in ways that she is not sure of, but that feeling of losing control is almost addictive.

This is so very different to her previous award-winning book, The Outrun. That was her story of turning back from alcohol addiction and using the natural world as a crutch to help her through the difficult parts. This is very different. To begin with, there is much more sex in here than you would normally find in a book located in the natural history section of your bookshop, but she still has that magical way of writing that her debut had.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

To say that Jo and her sister had a difficult relationship with her father would be an understatement. They suffered beatings and oppression. Their brother never had that though and after her father passed away and her brother inherited everything she knew that she had to try and understand why he was this way.

She starts digging back through his past with the intention of putting it into a novel, but for each revelation about her father, she found contradictions in the stories that she would hear from her mother and elsewhere. Discovering the truth will take patience and time but she knows that she will find it.

It would be remiss of me to say that I actually liked this book, nothing to do with the plot of some of the characters or the quality of the writing though. Mostly it was because of the subject matter, male oppression and misogyny and the main character in the book. Baines has made him a really nasty piece of work, especially if you happen to be a female member of his family. For his son and others outside the family, he was considered a warm and generous man, a real contrast. For me, the best part of the plot is the way that Jo, the eldest daughter of this monster, unpicks the layers of secrecy of her father’s life. Baines writes well too, making this a good read. I am glad that I finally got to read it as I need to read outside the comfort zone of my usual genres more often. If you like family sagas with a difference then this might be one for you.

4 out of 5 stars

If you were to look through the photos on my phone you will find pictures of books, the odd meme, my cat, Millie and lots of photos of clouds and sunsets. I find the skies endlessly fascinating, particularly the way the clouds constantly and endlessly change. Here is one I took recently:

In this beautiful book, Storm Dunlop has chosen some utterly beautiful pictures of a variety of weather phenomena and the night sky. It is split into six sections, colours, clouds, weather, phenomena, dawn & dusk and night

There is not a bad picture in here, though there are some that are much better than others. Some favourites in this book are the lightning and aurora images, but there are some equally great sunsets and those enormous storm clouds that only seem to happen in America. If you have the slightest interest in the weather, then this should be on your reading list.

Having a week’s holiday really helps with the reading, I got through 18 books this month, including four fiction books! We went to Corfu and it was lovely. Reading Prospero’s Cell whilst there brought the place alive. So here is what I read:

Books Read

Tiger – Polly Clark – 3 Stars

Astral Travel – Elizabeth Baines – 3 Stars

RSPB ID Spotlight – Garden Bugs – Marianne Taylor, Stephen Message – 3 Stars

RSPB ID Spotlight – Ducks, Geese and Swans – Marianne Taylor, Stephen Message – 3 Stars

A Sky Full Of Kites – Tom Bowser – 3.5 Stars

The Mortal Word – Genevieve Cogman – 3.5 Stars

Opened Ground Poems 1966 – 1996 – Seamus Heaney – 3.5 Stars

The Seven Deadly Sins – Various, Tr. Mara Faye Lethem – 3.5 Stars

The Spy Who Was Left Out In The Cold – Tim Tate – 3.5 Stars

The Instant – Amy May – 3.5 Stars

Rule, Nostalgia – Hannah Rose Woods – 3.5 Stars

Sky – Storm Dunlop – 4 Stars

Prospero’s Cell – Lawrence Durrell – 4 Stars

Where My Feet Fall – Duncan Minshull – 4 Stars

Sea State – Tabitha Lasley – 4 Stars

My House of Sky – Hetty Saunders – 4 Stars

Take My Hand – Dolen Perkins-Valdez – 4 Stars

Book Of The Month

My book of the month is a travel book. In this, Rebecca tells the story of her journey across Europe and North Africa on the way to Iran. It is a refreshing read as she is not there to win a prize, rather it is the story of a trip that she does because she just wanted to.

The Slow Road to Tehran – Rebecca Lowe

Top Genres

Natural History – 20

Travel – 17

Poetry – 10

History – 10

Fiction – 7

Memoir – 7

Science – 7

Top Publishers

William Collins – 7

Faber & Faber – 7

Picador – 4

Eland – 4

Bloomsbury – 4

Unbound – 4

Review Copies Received

Inside Qatar – John McManus

Our Haunted Shores – Ed Emily Alder, Jimmy Packham & Joan Passey

Thunderstone – Nancy Campbell

Be/longing – Amanda Thomson

Nomad Century – Gaia Vince

Return to My Trees – Matthew Yeomans

(un)interrupted tongues – Dal Kular

Library Books Checked Out

Sea State – Tabitha Lasley

Time On Rock – Anna Fleming

Ravilious: Wood Engravings – James Russell

Where The Wildflowers Grow – Leif Bersweden

Secret Britain – Sinclair McKay

Books Bought

Hardy Landscapes – Gordon Beningfield

Landscape – Charlie Waite

Landscape in Britain – Charlie Waite & Adam Nicolson

Peregrine Falcons – Roy Dennis

Ospreys – Roy Dennis

The Making of the English landscape: Dorset – Christopher Taylor

Exiles – William Atkins

Dilbert 2.0 – Scott Adams

Orlam – P.J Harvey

Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone – Jackie Morris