‘Magnificent’ Guardian

‘Remarkable ? A compact classic!’ Bill McKibben

‘I learned something new – and found something amazing – on every page’ Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources. Here, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment, and their systemic destruction in the pursuit of profit. Travelling from the fens of sixteenth-century England to America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Fen, Bog and Swamp is both a revelatory history and an urgent plea for wetland reclamation, from one of our greatest prose stylists.

‘A rousing call to action’ Esquire

‘Sparklingly furious ? it has a profoundly positive message’ Richard Mabey, Telegraph

‘This haunting tribute ? is a pleasure to read’ Financial Times

Throughout the collection, Annie Proulx invests these stories with an intelligence and black humour that transforms them into something new and surprising. In one story, a slight young man defies his mother’s insults to become a rodeo star, while in another, an octogenarian finds himself drawn back to the ranch that he quit decades before – against his better judgement. Elsewhere, Proulx demonstrates her taste for the macabre in a grisly tale of bad weather, gambling and amputation set a hundred years ago.

Inventive, compassionate and wildly funny, these marvellous stories explore the unbreakable bond between a people and their land.

‘A subject that could not be more important. A compact classic!’ Bill McKibben

‘I learned something new – and found something amazing – on every page’ Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx – whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth – comes an urgent and riveting history of wetlands, their ecological role and how the loss of them threatens the planet.

Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources, and in four illuminating parts Proulx documents the emergence of their systemic destruction in the pursuit of profit and the consequent release of their stored carbon. Wide-ranging and idiosyncratic, Proulx’s explanation of wetlands takes readers to the fens of sixteenth-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire and America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and introduces the nineteenth-century explorers who launched the ravaging of the Amazon rainforest.

Proulx was born in the 1930s, a time, as she says, when ‘in the ever-continuing name of progress, Western countries busily raped their own and other countries of minerals, timber, fish and wildlife.’ Fen, Bog & Swamp is both a revelatory history and an urgent plea for wetland reclamation from a writer whose passionate devotion to observing and preserving the environment is on glorious display.

‘Magnificent, bringing to life hitherto overlooked habitats’ Guardian

‘Proulx’s sparkling book will open your eyes to humanity’s reckless trashing of wetlands’ Telegraph

‘A haunting tribute ? Proulx’s poetic description of these places, and peat itself, is a pleasure to read’ Financial Times

Quoyle is a hapless, hopeless hack journalist living and working in New York. When his no-good wife is killed in a spectacular road accident, Quoyle heads for the land of his forefathers – the remotest corner of far-flung Newfoundland.

With ‘the aunt’ and his delinquent daughters – Bunny and Sunshine – in tow, Quoyle finds himself part of an unfolding, exhilarating Atlantic drama. ‘The Shipping News’ is an irresistible comedy of human life and possibility.

‘Accordion Crimes’ is a masterpiece of story-telling that spans a century and a continent. It opens in 1890 in Sicily, when an accordion-maker and his son, carrying little more than his finest button accordion, begin their voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion-maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynch mob, but his instrument carries the novel into another community of immigrants: German-Americans founding a new town in South Dakota. Moving from South Dakota to Texas, from Montana to Maine, the nine instantly compelling and intricately connected sections of the novel illuminate the lives of the founders of a nation, descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Germans, Irish, Scots and Franco-Canadians. Through the music of the accordion they express their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance.

‘Brokeback Mountain’ is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands, glad to have found each other’s company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for – an intimacy neither can forget.

‘Brokeback Mountain’ was made into an Academy Award-winning film by Ang Lee, and starred Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway.