Beastly is the 40,000-year story of our changing kinship with the animal world – from the smallest microbe to the largest creature that ever lived. Exploring this relationship through history, culture, science and inspiring examples, Carew makes the passionate case that animals are the key to the planet’s future health, but only if we can save them.

Animals have shaped our lives, our land, our civilisation, and they will shape our future. Yet as our impact on the world and the animals we share it with increases, there has never been a greater urgency to understand this foundational relationship.

Beastly is the 40,000-year story of animals and humans as it has never been captured before, seen eye-to-eye and claw-to-hand through those humans who have stepped into the myriad worlds of our animal relatives. Our relationship with animals has always been paradoxical, but the greatest paradox may yet be this: diversity of life can heal ecosystems. Animals – if given the chance – could save us.

Keggie Carew grew up under the spell of an unorthodox, enigmatic father. An undercover guerrilla agent during the Second World War, in peacetime he lived on his wits and dazzling charm. But these were not always enough to sustain a family.

As his memory began to fail, Keggie embarked on a quest to unravel his story once and for all. Dadland is that journey. It takes us into shadowy corners of history, a madcap English childhood, the poignant breakdown of a family, the corridors of dementia and beyond.

‘OH THIS BOOK. Beautiful and fierce and brave. Memory and war and family and loss and, well, wow’ Helen Macdonald, bestselling author of H is for Hawk

‘A thrilling history of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive… combined ingeniously with a tender, moving, funny portrait of the author’s father’ Nick Hornby, Observer