The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms-even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat.

In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake’s human stories-and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved.

‘Deeply profound? this is no ordinary memoir’ THE TIMES

‘Astounding’ ADAM FARRER

‘Brave and luminous’ SARAH LANGFORD

‘Mesmerising’ POLLY ATKIN

‘Beautifully written’ YORKSHIRE POST

‘Steadfastly honest’ GEOGRAPHICAL

A memoir of grief, nature and ancestry in rural Yorkshire.

I am setting out on a pilgrimage through an ancient landscape.

I will begin at my daughter’s grave.

Paleolake Flixton is an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. Human occupation of the site dates back thousands of years, but today, all that is left is a watermark.

Wendy Pratt brings readers on a pilgrimage around its periphery, to locations that have acted as journey markers in her own life. While traversing forests and fenland, she finds refuge in nature.

The Ghost Lake is a lyrical meditation on local history, changing landscapes, and the lives and legacies of rural working-class people.

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered.

It is the annual flood pulse-the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain-that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees. In demonstrating these threats to the riverine world, award-winning author James C. Scott examines the life history of a particular river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) of Burma, the heartland and superhighway of Burman culture.

Scott opens our understanding of rivers to encompass their entirety-tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic marshlands, and the assemblage of life forms dependent on rivers for their existence and well-being. For anyone interested in the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, rivers offer a striking example of the consequences of human intervention in trying to control and domesticate a natural process, the complexity and variability of which we barely understand.

‘Deeply profound? this is no ordinary memoir’ THE TIMES

‘Astounding’ ADAM FARRER

‘Brave and luminous’ SARAH LANGFORD

‘Mesmerising’ POLLY ATKIN

‘Beautifully written’ YORKSHIRE POST

‘Steadfastly honest’ GEOGRAPHICAL

A memoir of grief, nature and ancestry in rural Yorkshire.

I am setting out on a pilgrimage through an ancient landscape.

I will begin at my daughter’s grave.

Paleolake Flixton is an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. Human occupation of the site dates back thousands of years to prehistoric times. Over the millennia, the vast lake disappeared, turning to wetland and peaty fields. Today all that is left of it is a watermark.

Wendy Pratt brings the reader on a pilgrimage around the ghost lake, to locations that have acted as journey markers in her own life. While traversing forests and fenland, she reflects on the process of finding belonging in nature as a woman who exists in a series of liminal spaces – as a working-class writer, an infertile woman in a fertile world and a bereaved mother in a society focused on children.

An early draft of The Ghost Lake was longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize.

‘In this lyric memoir, award-winning poet Pratt explores the land-scape of the Yorkshire Moors, and the ancient lost lake of Flixton, weaving together nature writing with an exploration of grief, belonging and the lives of rural working-class people. THE BOOKSELLER

‘There are some autobiographical writers who speak of utilising nature’s healing properties to overcome life challenges without fully acknowledging the role of luck in their trajectories. Not infrequently these writers become cultural spokespeople for or representatives of a demographic that they are actually no longer a part of, leaving those who are still grappling with their plights feeling as though it’s a personal failing that they can’t make their way out the same mires. This is a very different sort of book, a steadfastly honest one that views nature as a refuge rather than a cure. Many should find solace here. And others will simply gain pleasure from the descriptions of the archaeological finds unearthed from Yorkshire’s rich black peaty soils’GEOGRAPHICAL

‘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

‘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

Seamlessly interweaving reflections from her own life with meditations on the art of wandering, Maiklem ultimately delivers-for Anglophiles and history lovers alike-a memorable treatise on the objects we leave in our wake, and the stories they can reveal if only we take a moment to look.

Simon Cooper grew up in Hampshire, where he first fell in love with fly fishing. Only after moving away did he realise how little people knew about the secret world of the chalkstreams.

Chalkstreams are nearly exclusive to England, ranging from Dorset to Yorkshire and including the famous River Test in Hampshire. Every river is special in its own right. Life of a Chalkstream is a lyrical and revealing voyage through the yearly cycle of this unique waterway.

From the remarkable spectacle of salmon, sea trout and brown trout spawning in winter, to the emergence of water voles in spring and the explosion of mayflies in the early days of summer, the author evocatively describes the natural wonders of the chalkstream. He introduces us to the fascinating diversity of life that inhabits its waters and environs – the fish, the angling community, the plant life and the wildlife. We learn how neglect threatens these inhabitants and why the fight to save the chalkstreams is so vital, not only for fishermen, but for anybody who values the beauty of rural England.