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From the bestselling and award-winning nature writer Adam Nicolson, a glorious new adventure into the British wilderness.
By Adam Nicolson's home, there is a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles. It is passed through by deer, wild boar and many birds – nightingales who sing in the evening, a cuckoo, turtle doves, pheasants, robins, owls. A couple of years ago, he decided to embark on an attempt to redress his ignorance, to encounter birds, to engage with this marvellous layer of life he had so far looked past. He wanted to look and listen, to return to 'bird school' and see what it might teach him.
This gorgeous book is the result, tracing Adam's adventure setting up a small shed on the edge of the field and getting to know the birds: where they nest, how they sing, how they mate and fight, what preys on them, what they are like as living things. It is beautifully written and woven through with philosophy, literature, science and emotion. Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, and exposes our relationship as people with the wild.
Adam Nicolson is a prize-winning writer of many books on history, nature and the countryside including The Sea is Not Made of Water, The Making of Poetry, Sea Room, God's Secretaries, The Gentry and the acclaimed The Mighty Dead. His 2017 book, Seabird's Cry was picked as Waterstones Book of the Month in Scotland and won the prestigious Wainwright Prize for nature writing and the Jeffries Prize. He is the winner of the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award and the British Topography Prize. He has written and presented many television series and lives on a farm in Sussex.
PRAISE FOR ADAM NICOLSON'S LIFE BETWEEN THE TIDES
'Miraculous ... Effortlessly, in deft, sure and delightful prose, he segues through species, science and art to present tidal nature as a microcosm. The result is an utterly fascinating glimpse of a watery world we only thought we knew'
Philip Hoare
'A beautiful, powerful story of how we understand the unfolding change of the shore.
This is a remarkable and powerful book, the rarest of things, both a call-to-arms and a call-to-pause and truly look. Nicolson is unique as a writer, happy soaked to the skin on the shoreline and happy unweaving skeins of philosophy. I loved it'
Edmund de Waal
'Pure joy. From the ecology of a sandhopper to the cosmic pull of the tides Adam Nicolson takes us paddling into the pools of our own nature ... a dazzling, kaleidoscopic exploration into the meaning of life itself'
Isabella Tree
'A fascinating guide to all things littoral: a natural history of the rockpool that teems with life ... Endlessly interesting, its wonders unfurl, fractal-like, the more closely you examine it'
Cal Flyn
'The man who finds wonder in a winkle ... Remarkable ... In Nicolson's hands the intertidal zone is shown to be rich and revelatory ... It is as lyrical, learned and rambunctiously eccentric as his previous work ... For a book so focused on non-human life, it is luminously humane'
The Times
'Exquisite ... A bravura act of writing ... This uniquely and terribly moving book is great literature indeed - reaches beyond itself to speak to us of the most profound and essential things'
Alex Preston, Observer
'One of our finest writers of non-fiction ... Nicolson's overarching theme in this book ... goes to the very heart of what ecology is ... the great pleasure of this book is that he does not allow the specifics of his enquiries to keep him from probing the big questions'
Philip Marsden, Spectator
