As the weathers and rhythms of the world evolve into new patterns and play out their seasonal changes, Bookhugger suggests several titles that might entice you out into the garden on a cooling evening to watch the winged-commute back to the roost, send you on a late night walk to follow a fox about its business, or, to think, just for a second about that ragged plant you see every day, but don’t know the name of, let alone its story.

You don’t have to look far, wilderness can be found anywhere, even in that crack in the pavement right outside your door, or in that patch of blue sky you glimpse from your desk… And such wild places may also be found in the far history of this planet where all that there was, was wild; or in a bleak dystopian future of white-out wilderness that might be all we have to look forward to. Or maybe, maybe you just want to be left alone…

Julius Winsome, by Gerard Donovan

Many men live in these woods who cannot live anywhere else… such men live at the end of all the long lanes in the world, and in reaching a place like this they have run out of country they can’t live in. They have no choice but to build, and so they go as far out of the way as they can even here, in the deep shade of the trees.

Julius Winsome lives in a cabin in the hunting heartland of the Maine woods, with only his books and Hobbes, his dog, for company. That is until the morning he finds Hobbes has been shot dead, and not by accident.

From this starting point, Gerard Donovan weaves an extraordinary tale that explores ideas of revenge and the threat of the wild, but one that is also a tender and heartbreaking paean to lost love. Narrated by the unforgettable voice of Julius himself – at once compassionate, vulnerable and threatening – it reads like a timeless, lost classic.

There is a day, an hour when winter comes, the second it slips in the door with its weather and says, I am here… People defeat the winter by reading out the nights, spinning pages a hundred times faster than a day turns, small cogs revolving a larger one through all those months… It is also the time when an entire day squeezes in through the single bedroom window and I stayed in bed most of the day, the blankets warmer than the air.

Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, by Michael McCarthy

You should be hearing it from mid-April onwards  – the unmistakable, musical, two-note call of the cuckoo, the most distinctive of all the signals of spring.  But the cuckoo’s only one of a whole group of birds we might call the spring-bringers – summer visitors which migrate here from Africa, including the swallow, the willow warbler, the nightingale and the turtle dove – which are increasingly threatened. So  now’s the time to look for them in the countryside - Michael McCarthy.

A celebration of the migrant birds that herald spring and a stark warning that they may be fast disappearing.

If we could see it as a whole, if they all arrived in a single flock, say, we would be truly amazed: sixteen million birds. Swallows, martins, swifts, warblers, wagtails, wheatears, cuckoos, chats, nightingales, nightjars, thrushes, pipits and flycatchers pouring into Britain from sub-Saharan Africa.

It is one of the enduring wonders of the natural world. Each bird faces the most daunting of journeys – navigating epic distances, dependent on bodily fuel reserves. Yet none can refuse. Since pterodactyls flew, twice-yearly odysseys have been the lot of migrant birds.

For us, for millennia, the Great Arrival has been celebrated. From The Song of Solomon, through Keats’ Ode To a Nightingale, to our thrill at hearing the first cuckoo call each year, the spring-bringers are timeless heralds of shared seasonal joy.

Yet, migrant birds are finding it increasingly hard to make the perilous journeys across the African desert. Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo is a moving call to arms by an impassioned expert: get outside, teach your children about these birds, don’t let them disappear from our shores and hearts.

Far North, by Marcel Theroux

Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city.

Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check. Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere – a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society.

What Makepeace finds is a world unravelling, stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace’s journey also leads to unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this frozen world.

Far North leads the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity’s origins to its likely end. Bleak, haunting, spare – and yet ultimately hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world’s fragility and beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses.

Read a review of Far North and an interview with Marcel Theroux at Bookgeeks.

Weeds and Wild Flowers, by Alice Oswald and Jessica Greenman

Weeds and Wild Flowers is a magical meeting of the poems of Alice Oswald and the etchings of Jessica Greenman. Within its pages, everyday flora take on an extraordinary life, jostling – comically at times, at times tragically – for a foothold in a busying world.

Stunningly visualised and skilfully animated, this imaginative collaboration beckons us toward a landscape of botanical characters, and invites us to see ourselves among them.

Weeds and Wild Flowers, which grew out of a number of conversations with Jessica Greenman, is not an illustrated book. It is two separate books, a book of etchings and a book of poems, shuffled together. What connects them both is their contention that flowers are recognizably ourselves elsewhere; but whereas the etchings express that thought dynamically in the postures of the pictures, the poems make fun of it, using the names of flowers to summon up the fauna of the psyche. My hope is that the experience of reading and looking at the book will be a slightly unsettling pleasure, like walking through a garden at night, when the plants come right up to the edges of their names and then beyond them. It is not, for that reason, a reliable guide to wild flowers, though it may be a reliable record of someone’s wild or wayside selves – Alice Oswald.

The Gathering Night, by Margaret Elphinstone

The River sings many songs at River Mouth Camp, sometimes loud and angry, and sometimes in the gentlest of whispers. On the night of Esti’s birth the River sang with its whole throat. It told of snow melting in the hills, of water under the earth stirring deep roots, of white water filling empty steambeds, of overflowing banks and flooded marshes. In Thaw Moon the River sings of its own strength, and its death for People or Animals to meddle with it.

Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when one of her brothers goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia’s mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son. Then a stranger from a rival tribe appears on their hearth seeking shelter. Are his stories of a great wave and a people perished really to be believed? What else could drive a man to travel alone between tribes in the depths of winter? Hopes of resolution come when Alaia’s mother returns home as a Go-Between, one able to commune with the spirits. But as all the Auk people come together for their annual Gathering Night, who there will listen to the voice of a woman?

The Gathering Night is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disasters. This utterly enchanting pre-historical novel is set deep in our stone-age past, but resonates as a parable of our troubled planet 8000 years on.

1. Lizzie Says:
   June 26th, 2009 at 6:41 pm

   Cool site! Found you through a link elsewhere. the cover for “Far North” reminded me of a book I read as a teen-ager, long ago: “Ice Station Zebra,” by someone … MacLean. Good grief, I read and loved all of them, but can’t recall the name! Silly me. Nature, to me, is always front and center in Westerns, just because of the landscape and the need to confront nature frequently. Check out the Wild West
   (Nevada) as portrayed in “The Shopkeeper” by James Best. It’s an excellent page-turned, with a new twist in every chapter. The rough and ready spirit of the West is there, mixed with the ins and outs, and twists and turns, of the politics of the place. And the details of life in a mining town, on a ranch and on the trail make the book come alive.

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