3.5 out of 5 stars

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

The story in this book has four focal points, Frieda is a primatologist who has an amazing talent with Bonobo’s, but has her entire world shatter along with her head following an attack on the way home. She is fortunate to get another job at a private zoo, and her new charge is a beautiful and wild Siberian Tiger.

This cub came from the wilds of Siberia, and the second story concerns Tomas and his father and the men that work with them monitoring the tigers that wander their vast landscapes. In this wilderness are a mother and a daughter who are eking out a living on the scares foods that are available, until one day they attract the attention of a female Siberian Tiger. The final story is from this tiger’s perspective as she brings up her cubs in one of the most hostile environments on this planet.

I liked lots of things about this book; I liked the way the four separate stories linked and the way that she brought them all together at the end and I liked the way that the final story was written from the perspective of the tiger. The flawed characters were great and added the necessary drama to the plot, but I did have the odd issue with it though, in particular a couple of scenes that came across as utterly implausible. But they were minor really, the part that shines throughout each of the stories is the magnificent Siberia Tiger.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

There is a chance of genuine peace between the dragons and the Fae, or at least there was until a senior diplomat was stabbed. Irene is summoned along with a detective called Vale, to see if they can solve the murder. The time they arrive in an 1890s version of Paris and hope that her neutrality and experience can rescue the talks and solve the murder.

But these things are never straightforward, and having the presence of the Blood Countess, a Fae who is there to disrupt the conference in the city. As they uncover the evidence they find that the suspect could be any number of people, including a member of the library who is supposed to be there in a neutral capacity. And as ever someone wants her removed from the investigation, or ideally dead…

This is another fast-paced page-turner in this very likeable series. Even though you know, for each of the seemingly impossible tasks that Irene is presented with, she is somehow going to survive. As the plot unravels, it is the journey I’m here for though and that is what makes this series worth reading. I am now familiar with the characters now, but one flaw I find is that they don’t seem to develop that much. If you want a fantasy series that is slightly different to other things out there, then I can recommend this.

4 out of 5 stars

For several Sunday evenings in a row, I would see a fox around 8 pm. I am not sure if it was the same one as I would see it in different places. It was quite bold and was utterly unphased by me being in a car going past it. We have even had them in the back garden on occasion. It goes to show that the urban fox is a mammal that is readily adaptable to the challenges that we throw at it.

Crumley is an admirer of these animals too and in these chapters, he tells us six stories of foxes beginning with one that appears from under his plane as it is sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow. Mostly he finds them as he moves around his beloved Highland landscapes, sometimes at the end of a pair of binoculars but occasionally a face-to-face encounter.

I like Crumley’s writing style so this is a perfect little book. I would have really liked more of it too, as I felt bereft when it had finished. I have read one of the others, and that, like this, has a stunning cover too. Must buy some of the others now.

4 out of 5 stars

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

I have been fortunate enough to see dolphins a few times, but have not yet seen a whale. Should I ever be lucky enough to do so then I am going to need this book with me. They are not the easiest animals to spot. This new authoritative and up-to-date guide by Mark Carwardine and a significant number of whale experts and biologists around the world have packed it with detailed colour illustrations and helpful identification tips.

For a field guide, it is utterly beautiful to look at, almost too good to take on a boat where it will probably get wet! That said, you really need to have this with you if you have the opportunity to go whale watching. The information is clear and concise, and they have picked details that may help you identify the glimpses that you are most likely to get in the oceans. I thought it was a top-notch guidebook.

3.5 out of 5 stars

This is Raynor Winn’s follow-up book to the very successful Salt Path, the story of Moth, her husband being diagnosed with a terminal illness and them both losing absolutely everything. They set off to walk the South West Coast Path and discover the beauty of this coastline and their own natural resilience to the hardships of life.

This book covers the time before and after that book was printed and the changes that its success gave to their lives and the opportunities that they had because of it. So much so that one person who read it gave them the chance to move to a farm for reasonable rent with the promise that they would bring wildlife back to the fields and hedgerows.

I thought that this book neatly filled in the details of their lives before and after they completed the walk on the path to the publication of the book. Winn has a way with words, that makes this really easy to read. I did like this a lot, but for me, The Salt Path had the edge on this. I thought that she might have mentioned being shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, the first and only time I have had the pleasure of meeting her and Moth. It is much more of a memoir than a nature book but that outlook on the natural world permeates throughout the book. I did think that the walk through Iceland didn’t quite fit with the rest of the book, that said I get why she included it, as it is relevant to Moth’s health.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Just north of where I live is not one but two deserted villages, Knowlton and on the opposite bank of the River Allen is Brockington. I have walked past them on a guided tour and looked at the bumps in the fields. There are various reasons why this might have happened, the Black Death being a popular one, but the exact reason may never be known.

Matthew Green first heard of Dunwich in 2016, a medieval city that had fallen into the sea because of coastal erosion. The last church in the city had dropped into the sea in 1922 and the mysticism of the place intrigued him. It would be the beginnings of a series of journeys that would take him from the wonderfully named Winchelsea to the bleak Scottish islands that are battered by the Atlantic, to the mountains of Wales where a village was deliberately drowned to provide an English city with water.

I thoughts parts of this were excellent, particularly the chapters on Skara Brae on Orkney and Stanford in Norfolk. These two chapters had Green visiting the sites and teasing out the stories from what he was observing. Other chapters were more of a potted history with a handful of paragraphs when he did actually rock up to the place. It can’t be easy to get the feel of a location that mostly is at the bottom of the sea or is a series of lumps and bumps in a field, but reading this I felt that he had researched these places mostly from a desk. It was not bad overall, but I thought it could have been much better.

3.5 out of 5 stars

I have lived in Dorset now for 17 years and I think that it is one of the most beautiful counties. It has a richly varied coastline and the landscapes vary from scarce heathland to the impressive cliffs of the Jurassic coastline. A few minutes on your favourite search engine and you can find some of the amazing photographs taken here.

The images in this book though were created by artists and cartographers hundreds of years before anyone had invented the photograph. The oldest image in here is from 1539 and Burnet has collected them together in various subjects including Towns, Castles and churches and Country Life.

I thought that this was a fascinating collection, alongside each illustration is a description of what it is as well as any details about the subject. There have been changes in over the years, it is kind of inevitable really, but every now and again there is a picture that shows how little has changed! One for the Dorset fan.

3.5 out of 5 stars

It was following an interview with a fellow author called Russell Norman about his book Venice that made up Grigson’s mind. She would sell of give away anything that she couldn’t get into her purple car and move to Puglia in Italy. In May 2019 she arrived back there after an absence of 40 years.

Stopping in the town of Vieste she felt welcomed by a magnificent dinner and epic firework display to celebrate a saint. But this wasn’t the place for her, she wanted to go further south and ended up in Ceglie Messapica where she finds a place where she will make her home.

Whilst the food in Puglia is Italian, it is also very much not Italian as it doesn’t take long for her to notice the differences and discover the unique flavours and styles. Each chapter picks up on a food-centric theme about life there, from wood-fired ovens to the absence of cows in the landscape. Some of the dishes look wonderful and will be trying some out.

I liked this a lot, she paints a wonderful picture of life there. I have been to Sardinia and Sicily and Umbria but not this part of Italy as yet. There are more recipes than travel writing than I would have preferred, but Grigson is still an entertaining and informative writer and each recipe has an introduction or a potted history about the dish. If you like Italy and want to make yourself hungry whilst reading this is a good place to start.

4 out of 5 stars

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

On the northwest of the island of Jamacia is a tiny hamlet called Cousin Cove. It is alongside the sea and it is full of larger-than-life characters who are making the best of the life that they have there. There are no secrets in this place and as soon as anything of interest begins to happen people are drawn in to see what is happening.

There are eleven short interconnected stories in the book, with a rich array of characters in each. They are always on the lookout to supplement their meagre incomes but any means, fair or foul and had nothing to lose by taking a chance. Most people, especially tourists didn’t stop unless they happened to come unstuck on the road in. There were always lads waiting to help them out of the swamp in the hope of a few dollars.

Other stories concern those asked to look after tourists second homes and are quite surprised to find that they have returned without telling them they were returning. They have half an hour to reclaim the possessions that have been borrowed by other villagers. They all dream of getting of the island, something that they are very unlikely to ever have the chance of. Half of them have no idea where their birth certificate is.

My favourite story was Tree Bay Gyal. It is about three women who are using every trick they know to seduce a tourist. They, along with everyone else in Cousin Cove have plans for a money-making scheme and yet almost none get off the ground. Like all the other stories, there is always the scent of ganja in the background as they mull over their lives at the end of a spliff.

Kennaway has painted this evocative image of a tiny Jamaican village and I really liked this. It has a dark streak of humour that runs all the way through the story as we learn how the characters try to make money from the various schemes they concoct. The patois took me a little while to get used to, but it feels authentic. I can recommend this is you want a little insight into how life was in Jamacia in the 1990s.