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

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.