5 out of 5 stars

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

It is only now that so many of us have lost that connection to the natural world we are starting to realise just how important it is. Time spent outdoors walking along a path, or sitting by the river recharges us in ways that we cannot comprehend, but have a deep need for.

But for some people that connection is much more vivid and real. Dara McAnulty is one of those people. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s and autism just over a decade ago and because he was so different to other children, was the victim of bullying at school. Getting out into the natural world was more than an escape from this torment, it became a life support system for him.

Lying below the oak, I can feel it surging below the ground, the roots curling around me, a restless energy feeding me strength.

It is this lifeline that he had from the world around him that gives him the energy to carry on fighting for the things he believes in. Moving home and school took him away from the places that he had grown to love, but this change became a positive one. He found new places to visit, like Murlough Beach where he could see seals, butterflies and hear the scream of gull and the song from the skylarks above the dunes. The new school is a positive too, rather than constantly being defensive and hating it, he is beginning to thrive.

Other changes were afoot too, he was becoming more involved in campaigning, heading to the UK to hand in a petition to the Prime Minister and was even asked to read a poem at the People’s Walk for Wildlife. His fury about the lack of action to protect wildlife and the natural world is starting to have an impact.

I must say that I really enjoyed this book. For someone so young, he has an amazing talent already as a writer. This diary format works real too, you sense the daily battle and the ebbs and flows he has with life in general. I think this comes from within, he is deeply passionate about this cause primarily because it sustains him. It is very evident from this book too that he has grasped from a young age the interconnectedness of all things. This is almost certainly connected to his autism, but I think that this is a strength rather than a weakness. McAnulty has a bright future in this world, troubled as it is at the moment. I think that he has the will to influence others to begin that change that the planet needs.

4 out of 5 stars

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

If you want to see wildlife without having to even leave your house, then one of the easiest things to do is look out the window for birds. Łubieński fell in love with birds, when his mother read Four Feather Friends to him. However, this passion had lapsed in the years after childhood, and it only resurfaced again at the end of his college years when he discovered a Polish edition of Birds of Europe. He purchased it and a new pair of binoculars and fell in love with all of the birds again.

Łubieński is fascinated by the inspiration that our avian friends have on music, films, books and dance and he explores some of them in this book. I had read about A Kestrel for a Knave before in other books, as well as the bird watchers who managed to still pursue their hobby whilst interred in a German POW camp. I wasn’t aware of the source of Ian Fleming’s well-known spy, James Bond or what President Mitterrand had for his last meal.

But there is more to this book than a few interesting cultural references, his writing is such that you feel close by where he is watching from. It can be settled in a hay bundle observing a flock of cranes gurgling and hooting the other side of a meadow or revisiting an old cottage that is just standing and seeing nature claim it once again. He muses about the creation myth of the stork and heads out to see if he can still find nests in the country.

Łubieński’s book is very different from a lot of what I have read in natural history writing. He is an enthusiastic bird watcher rather than a twitcher and this shows in the book. To start with it was refreshingly different, his writing is curious and intelligent with a deep-rooted warmth to his feathered subjects. His is fascinated in the way that the avian world has influenced our cultural landscape too. But mostly this is about the pure pleasure of seeing birds around you on a daily basis. Highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

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

If someone was to have asked me what I thought the second largest country in Europe was, I wouldn’t have picked Ukraine. Turns out it is. Up until now, I had only known it as the location of the town of Chernobyl, the location of the world worst nuclear disaster to date. This was the first of many crises that enveloped the country, ousting of former presidents and the Russian annexation of Crimea are two of the notable events that have shaped this country. There

Back in 2015, Jens Mühling decided to try and discover this enigma of a country for himself. Climbing on a bus in Poland he wanted to try to discover why this place had been subservient to a variety of powers for the past thousand years. After a minor delay at the border towns of Medyka and Shehyni, he was in. There never used to be a border there until relatively recently. The whole region used to be called Galicia and was part of Poland. But borders have a habit of moving and places come under different fiefdoms and this region was no different, even being part of Austria at one point in its history.

Travelling onto Lviv, there he meets a Pani Kristina who takes him around the local prison which was where 1000 people were slaughtered by the retreating Soviets. This was a propaganda boom for the Nazi’s at the time, who filled it once again with their own choice of dissident and committed equally appalling atrocities. He also meets a man who at one point was in the SS Galacia division. After the war, he returned to Lviv as he was a member of the OUN. He was soon caught by the Soviets and imprisoned along with thousands of others.

In the South-West of the country is the town of Dilove. The countryside he passes through is undeveloped, but beautiful farm and smallholding land that seemed to have been heading back to a pre-industrial time. It is a beguiling sight. It is dark by the time he arrives, but the view he glimpses of the mountains stands out starkly from the sky. Called Transcarpathia by people from Kiev, it originally used to belong to Hungary, then Czechoslovakia before the residents declared their own state. It lasted a day before it was invaded again. It was absorbed into the Soviet bloc before independence in 1991. It is a town that he finds fascinating, but he is made very aware of the way that the place has been marginalised over the years.

He heads to other cities in the country, visits museums where he is the sole visitor, share a bus seat with a woman holding a giant pumpkin who had never seen a foreigner before and arrives in the city of Uman as 30,000 Hasidim arrive to commemorate the passing of Rabbi Nachman. He arrives in Kiev, as the chestnuts are falling from the trees and collecting at the bottom of the hills. He even manages to get over to the Crimea which is now controversially part of Russia once again.

I thought that this was a carefully written book about a country that isn’t always visible on a global stage. His descriptions of the landscape he passes while looking out the windows of buses and trains show a country that has not really emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mühling makes an effort to engage with all the people that he meets, even if he doesn’t necessarily agree with their point of view. There is a lot of history in this country and he draws the stories of the country out revealing details of places that have been subservient to greater European powers whilst mostly being ignored by them.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

We are not the only animal that can communicate. A lot of animals send out warning signals when a threat is sensed. Dolphins and whales have perfected the art of conversation across small and vast distances to keep in touch with one another. But almost no others have the level of language and communication that we have developed. Which is why with that ability that we have as human beings, it is strange that some have made the conscious decision not to talk unless it is unavoidable.

Harriet Shawcross was one of those. As a teenager, she withdrew from communicating and socialising unless really necessary, spending time in obscure parts of the school to avoid contact with fellow pupils. It was something that she thankfully grew out of, but it sparked an interest in why some people chose to not communicate with others but also why some people lost the art of speech and in some cases writing too.

Her journey will take her from the ghosts of her past to the history of the illness where it was first identified by a Swiss doctor, Moritz Tramer, who first named it elective mutism. It has since become known as selective mutism as it is now understood that children are not choosing who and when to speak to people, rather they are gripped by paralysing anxiety. A conversation with the speech therapist, Maggie Johnson, who learnt this the hard way with a boy where the thought of talking to anyone, filled him with abject terror. She now works with children getting to overcome this fear, using exercises to override their flight response.

Her search for silence takes her to America where a camp for children helps them to overcome their silence by pushing them, a technique that has its detractors. Remembering the time she was cast in the play The Vagina Monologues but decided against it as it went to a place that she thought was beyond her comfort zone. She ends up in New York and interviews Eve Ensler in her apartment about the effect that the book and play have had on breaking the taboo about this intimate part of the body. Other travels take her to Nepal where she meets those that lost so much in the 2015 earthquake, attends a service with the Quakers and goes on various retreats.

We live in such a noisy world that the cacophony often hides the silence that some people are overwhelmed by. Shawcross has made a good attempt in this book to open up the discussion about selective mutism and how it affects people in different ways. At times her writing is lucid and full of power. However, I did have a few issues with the book though; it did seem to lack a little focus at times and whilst her personal story was relevant at the beginning as an opening piece, the others seemed unnecessary embellishments to the book. Not bad overall though and some may find it useful to read.

Well, that seemed a much longer month than usual and it is the first month in ages that I have not bought a single book. Not one. Mind you I am not going to run out anytime soon. I have been sharing pictures of my crammed shelves on Twitter, follow the #ShowUsYourShelves hashtag to see mine and hundreds of others. Would you like to see a bookshelf tour on here? Let me know in the comments. I had a week off in April, and it was my 25th Wedding Anniversary. Our children did a Lockdown dinner for us which was lovely of them.

Even though I had the week off, I spent a lot of time faffing and ended up reading 16 books in the end, and that was only because I read three very short fiction books at the end of the month. Really need to get a wriggle on as I am only just ahead of my Good Reads target at the moment. Anyway, onto the books that I read in April. It was a mixed selection as you can see:

I have been following Tim Clare for a little while on Twitter and he asked if people could read and review his book. Thankfully the library had a copy which I got before they closed. I quite liked it, but it has masses going on and I think reading the first would have helped with the context. Cynan Jones is another author that I have been following on twitter for a while now and really liked Stillicide which I read last year. I have had Cove for a while after buying it last year, it is a sparsely written novella about a man who is struck by lightning whilst out in a kayak and it is his fight for survival. And that is all I will say about it.

Salt kindly added Used To Be to an order that I placed with them a while ago and I finally got to read it at the end of the month. It is not a bad collection of short stories. A more contemporary take on the short story is How the Light Gets In by Clare Fisher. It is an interesting collection and feels rougher at the edges as modern life is.

I have long been fascinated by language and was fortunate enough to be sent a copy of Unspeakable by Harriet Shawcross. In this, she explains about her problem as a teenager of selective autism, this is where people choose not to speak to some or all people. It can be cured, but it is a slow process with those affected.

I am not sure I’d want to keep bees, but completely understand why some people want to. Liquid Gold is an amusing tale of Roger Morgan-Grenville taking up the hobby with a friend half his age and the things that they got up to.

I read two poetry books this month, Awaking and Holding Unfailing. Both very different as one is about climate change and the other is about a modern life in China.

Politics… Just hearing the word is enough for most people, but Tatton Spiller is fascinated by it. In We’re Living Through The Breakdown he evaluates some of the reason why it is so fraught these days and makes suggestions as to how to improve how we deal with each other politically

We are intrinsically linked to this planet and in Origins, lewis Dartnell shows just how we have been formed and shaped by the very rocks that we have walked upon. made for a fascinating read.

There is something about a Gibson book that grabs the zeitgeist by the dangly bits and reinvents just how to do a near future Scifi book. Agency is that book

Managed to read four travel books this month. First up was the latest by the wonderful Kapka Kassabova. In this, she heads over to the border of  North Macedonia, Albania, and Greece where there are two lakes, Ohrid and Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Her family were from there and this is a story of family and the push and pull of nations. Another book that was on the Stanford list was Last Days In Old Europe. More memoir than travel, Richard Bassett takes us back 40 years to some of the European countries where he worked. Fascinating read.

When people think of Ukraine then Chernobyl is the town that always comes to mind. But there is vast history in the rest of the country and Jens Mühling wants to discover all about it. A good refreshingly different perspective of a country that is always in turmoil. A calmer book is Leonie Charlton’s Marram Grass. She treks through the Outer Hebrides with her friend  and leaves small beads in memory of her mother. Lovely descriptions of a part of the world that I’d love to go to

My book of the month was the next in the Discworld series that I read, A Hat Full of Sky.  Terry Pratchett does it again with another great Tiffany Aching book and the always hilarious feegles.

3 out of 5 stars

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

The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one. ― Billy Connolly

In the last three years if you were ever brave enough to mention politics to anyone else then you would probably have a fairly heated discussion right up to a full-blown row. Unless they happened to share your point of view that is and then your point of view is often heard, amplified and echoed back to you. There are lots of people who have had enough too, and never intend to vote for anyone ever again.

Opinions are polarised, nationalism is on the rise, partly fuelled by people who are scared about change and the pace of the modern world and we have lost the ability to see a point from anyone else’s perspective. We have reached the point of Breakdown according to Spiller. This book has come from his work on Simple Politics, a project that is striving to make politics, clear interesting and most importantly, still relevant.

To do this he looks at a variety of different subjects that have caused strife over the past few years; immigration, privatisation, taxes, austerity and that political football of the past few years, Brexit. He takes each and look at it from the range of political viewpoints, considers some of the details like is tax good or bad, are immigrants taking our jobs or just doing some of the jobs we are keen on doing?

We all listen to voices that we are comfortable within our own echo chambers, regardless of what we think that we are doing. These are all complex and nuanced subjects that do not have a simple binary solution and as Spiller says, we have lost the ability to see the point of view from the other side that we used to have. What he is trying to do here is demonstrate how listening to an alternative point of view in an argument is not being shouted down by the other side, rather it is learning as we do as a small child that other people can know, feel and understand different things.

It is written in an easy-going conversational style that he has deliberately not made threatening. He has some reasonable suggestions to help us get on better politically, sadly though, I think that the people that really need to read this won’t ever consider picking it up. I would have preferred to have the How It All Works section at the beginning. I feel this would have set the framework of how everything works (or at least should do) and set the framework before moving onto the how others think and the main battlegrounds at the moment. I was slightly surprised that he doesn’t mention royal prerogative – the power of the prime minister to completely overrule and ignore, his cabinet, parliament and party, but that was a minor detail. Just remember to buy a different paper every now and again just to see where people that you might not agree with are coming from.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Some mother-daughter bonds are hugely strong and able to resist the traumas of all that life can through at them, others have much more traumatic relationships with their mothers, and Charlton was one of them. She took the brunt of her stepfather wrath too, as he blamed her for all sorts of things that were almost nothing to do with her. She left home at the age of 16, heading over to Australia to be a cowgirl, teaching in Japan and Catalonia to do a degree. She forged her own way in the world, but she knew she would never be safe or close to her mother again.

Marram – A coarse grass found on sandy beaches. From Old Norse maralmr, a compound of marr (“sea”) and halmr (“straw, reed”).

She had been out to the Outer Hebrides with her dad a long while ago for a fortnight’s holiday and it was a time that still meant so much to her many years later. He was a rock in her life, offering her the stability that living with her mother never gave her. Seven years after her mother had died, an act that she thought would loosen the bonds between them, she still felt the grief of her death was becoming overwhelming. What she did get from her mother that gave her some comfort was a love of horses, and in the planning for a long-distance trek through the islands of the Outer Hebrides with her friend, Shuna, she came up with the idea leaving a trail of beads as they trekked through.

Getting there with a truck and horsebox is not the easiest journey and the weather is not always the kindest as they were to find out over their two week trip from Barra all the way up to Lewis. However, it is a beautiful part of the world to travel through, and they were to be equally blasted and drenched as well as having glorious days of riding their horses, Chief and Ross. She had a small purse of beads from her mother, who was a jewellery maker. From here Charlton selects one or two beads at certain points on the journey to leave them; a bothy, on a gatepost, on the beach where the sea is just reaching and in some faerie milk holes.

My memories of her are a palimpsest like the sea-licked Lichens on the rocks at our feet, merely a thin breathing skin over the unfathomable story of the rock

I really liked this book because it is very different from a regular travel book. Several themes inhabit the prose; friendship, travel, memory, relationships, landscape and Charlton has deftly folded them together in such a way that they enhance each other, rather than one element becoming overbearing. Charlton is not relying on the natural world as a cure for her past life, rather the journey and the symbolism of placing the beads at significant points in the landscape is a release from the trauma of the past. There are moments of humour and anguish in equal measure, but mostly this is a book that is permeated with human kindness and warmth. Her evocative descriptions of the landscape that they are trekking through make this a special read too. It is one of those parts of the world that I’d love to go to when we’re allowed out again.