Nature & Environment

In this unforgettable and astutely observed travel account, Pulitzer Prize-winner John McPhee journeys into the wild frontiers and frigid climate of Alaska exploring the diverse terrain of this Northern US state. Travelling by foot and canoe, helicopter and dog team, McPhee traverses total wilderness, urban landscape, and the depths of the bush, drawing a rich and comprehensive history of this vast land and its varied inhabitants. With his keen eye and poetic sensibility at the helm, we paddl...

Darkness has shaped the lives of humans for millennia, and in Dark Skies, Tiffany Francis travels around Britain and Europe to learn more about nocturnal landscapes and humanity's connection to the night sky. For a year, Tiffany travels through different nightscapes across the UK and beyond. She experiences 24-hour daylight while swimming in the Gulf of Finland and visits Norway to witness the Northern Lights and speak to people who live in darkness for three months each year. She hikes throu...

'This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head.' Evocative, raw and lyrical, this startling debut explores the natural world through the eyes of Dara McAnulty, an autistic teenager coping with the uprooting of home, school, and his mental health, while pursuing his life as a conservationist and environmental activist. Shifting from intense darkness to light, recalling his sensory encounters in the wild - with blackbirds, whooper swans, ...

The Yukon River is almost 2,000 miles long, flowing through Canada and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Setting out to explore one of the most ruggedly beautiful and remote regions of North America, Adam Weymouth journeyed by canoe on a four-month odyssey through this untrammelled wilderness, encountering the people who have lived there for generations. The Yukon's inhabitants have long depended on the king salmon who each year migrate the entire river to reach their spawning grounds. Now the salmon...

For Wade Davis, Colombia was the first country that captured his heart and gave him license to be free. Here, he tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of their remarkable land. Braiding together memoir, history and journalism, Magdalena is at once an absorbing adventure through a spe...

In a centuries-old tradition, farmers in north-western Iceland scour remote coastal plains for the down of nesting eider ducks. High inside a cast cave in Borneo, men perched on rickety ladders collect swiftlets' nests, a delicacy believed to be a cure for almost anything. These luxury products are two of the seven natural wonders whose stories Harvest tells: eiderdown, vicuna wool, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano and edible birds' nests. It follows their journey from the wilde...

Fredrik Sjöberg - collector, romantic, explorer - spends his life tracing the smallest details of the natural world. In these two beautifully wrought tales he meditates on the joy of little things, childhood memories, long-forgotten Swedish entomologists, earthworms, wine-making, the National Parks of the United States, the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.Paperback: 560 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780141980317Published by Penguin Books

New Jersey is one of the most densely populated US states, but unknown to many it is also home to a vast wilderness, a forest of pines, oaks and cedars almost identical in size to the Grand Canyon. This is the Pine Barrens. People tend to think of New Jersey as a suburban thoroughfare, yet huge sections of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited. The sandy soil is too acidic for farming, but beneath it lies an immense natural reservoir of soft pure water, while millions of wild blueberry and cran...

In 1976 Ehrlich travelled from her home in New York to Wyoming to shoot a film on sheep herders. While she was there, her partner David died. What started out as a work trip became the beginning of a new life, and a long and deep attachment to place. Writing of sheep herding alone across Wyoming badlands, being struck by lightning, the true meaning of cowboys, and taking her new husband to the rodeo for their honeymoon, as well as the changing seasons, extreme winters and the wind, Ehrlich dr...

Redmond O'Hanlon describes his extraordinary three-week trip on an Orkney trawler as it journeys far into the north Atlantic in search of its catch. Young skipper Jason Schofield has a 2 million pound overdraft on his boat, the Norlantean, which is why he has to go out in a Category One Force 12 hurricane when the rest of the Scottish fleet has run for shelter. O'Hanlon may not be much help when it comes to seamanship--in the words of one of the crew, he doesn't know his arse from his tit--bu...

I have learned many words for 'island': isle, atoll, eyot, islet, or skerry. They exist in archipelagos or alone, and always, by definition, I have understood them by their relation to water. But the Chinese word for island knows nothing of water. For a civilisation grown inland from the sea, the vastness of mountains was a better analogue: (dao, 'island') built from the relationship between earth and sky. Between tectonic plates and conflicting cultures, Taiwan is an island of extremes: high...

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarl...

One night, Brooklyn-based artist and food writer Hannah Kirshner received a life-changing invitation to apprentice with a “saké evangelist” in a misty Japanese mountain village called Yamanaka. In a rapidly modernizing Japan, the region–a stronghold of the country’s old-fashioned ways–was quickly becoming a destination for chefs and artisans looking to learn about the traditions that have long shaped Japanese culture. Kirshner put on a vest and tie and took her place behind the saké bar. Befo...