Showing titles in Outdoors & Nature

Richard Askwith wanted more. Not convinced running had to be all about pounding pavements, buying fancy kit and racking up extreme challenges, he looked for ways to liberate himself. His solution: running through muddy fields and up rocky fells, running with his dog at dawn, running because he's being (voluntarily) chased by a pack of bloodhounds, running to get hopelessly, enjoyably lost, running fast for the sheer thrill of it. Running as nature intended.

To reduce risk of pandemics for ourselves, our gaze needs to turn to the health of animals. From the bestselling author of the essential new 2019 book on animal agriculture and climate crisis: We are the Weather Discover Jonathan Safran Foer's eye-opening and life-changing account of the meat we...

An international bestseller, the joys and challenges of a life dedicated to conservation are vividly described in The Elephants of Thula Thula by Françoise Malby-Anthony, owner of the Thula Thula reserve. 'Enthralling' - Daily Mail ‘Somehow, the elephants got into my soul, and it became my...

Imagine a jazz musician, improvising on a theme. Then imagine that he is able to play half a dozen instruments - not one after another, but almost simultaneously, switching effortlessly between instruments and musical styles with hardly a pause for breath. If you can countenance that, you are...

Ancient woods are Britain's richest habitats: rare fragments of our landscape that teem with life from soil to canopy. They live in our collective imagination as quiet places, best left pristine and untouched. But their story has always been one of interdependence with people. Now, as ever...

From world-renowned scientist Jane Goodall, as seen in the National Geographic documentary Jane, comes a poignant memoir about her spiritual epiphany and an appeal for why everyone can find a reason for hope. Dr. Jane Goodall's revolutionary study of chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe preserve...

A few months of married bliss, a lovers' nest in Darrowby and the wonders of home cooking are rudely interrupted for James Herriot by the Second World War. James Herriot's fifth volume of memoirs relocates him to a training camp somewhere in England. And in between square pounding and digging for victory, he dreams of the people and livestock he left behind him.

Sharks are ruthlessly efficient predators, the apex of 450 million years of evolution. They are older than trees, have survived five extinction events and are essential to maintaining balanced ocean ecosystems, but how much do we really know about their lives? The first book to reveal the hidden...

Past generations would tell time by shadows shrinking, the midday glow over a mountaintop, the crowing of the rooster in the darkness. They noticed the flowers that close at noon, sensed how the quality of light changes at dusk, and marked time at night by the motion of the stars. Today, in our clock-bound, screen-immersed world, most of us rely on machines to mark the hours. But what riches might we gain from reclaiming the forgotten art of sensing time by events in the living world?

Our precious archipelago is ravaged by climate change, bereft of natural ecosystems and lies at the mercy of global warming, flooding, drought and catastrophic biodiversity loss. But could restoring species that once helped protect our islands help turn this crisis around? From familiar yet imperilled honeybees and ancient oak woods to returning natives like beavers and boars, Britain’s cornerstone species may hold the key to recovering our biodiversity on land and in our seas.

In horse racing greatness is defined by speed. Being the second fastest counts for little. You have to win. And win. And keep winning until every challenger of your generation is put to the sword. Of the twelve horses lined up on Newmarket Heath that 2011 day, one would do just that. And more...

Finding herself in a new home in Brighton, Kate Bradbury sets about transforming her decked, barren backyard into a beautiful wildlife garden. She documents the unbuttoning of the earth and the rebirth of the garden, the rewilding of a tiny urban space. But while she's doing this Kate's neighbours continue to pave and deck their gardens locking them away, the wildlife she tries to save is further threatened, and she feels she's fighting an uphill battle.

Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride. In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the world's highest places.

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this passionately persuasive and sharply funny book, Katherine Rundell tells us how and why. A swift flies two million kilometres in its lifetime. That's far enough to get to the moon and back twice over - and then once more to the moon. A pangolin keeps its tongue furled in a pouch by its hip, a Greenland shark can live five hundred years, a wombat once inspired a love poem.

In his mid-twenties, restless in the routine of a city, Louis D. Hall found himself wondering how to create the life he wanted to lead. Inspired by Don Quixote, he decided to fulfil a childhood dream – to make an uncharted journey on horseback. After finding his horse Sasha in Italy’s Apennine Mountains, the pair set off and headed west for Cape Finisterre, ‘the end of the land’, unprepared for most of the dangers – snow, storms, wolves – that faced them.

The deadliest animal of all time meets the world's most legendary hunter in a classic battle between man and wild. But this pulse-pounding narrative is also a nuanced story of how colonialism and environmental destruction upset the natural order, placing man, tiger and nature on a collision...

Brought to you by Penguin. Guide-dog Laura needed a new home. And, after listening to her owner, Jaina, talk on the radio about what would happen to her much loved guide and companion when she retired, Martin Clunes picked up the phone. He’d always been a soft touch when it came to animals...

When Guirec Soudée was 21 years old, he bought a 30-foot sailboat and set out across the Atlantic, despite having only sailed a dinghy before. His only companion? His plucky pet hen, Monique. Guirec never intended to sail the world with a chicken, but after reaching the Caribbean, he and Monique made for Greenland - and emerged from the pack ice 100 days later.

In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks listeners through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It's a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. 

Over the past seventy years, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and other consumer goods makers have harnessed single-use plastics to turbocharge their profits. They've poured billions of dollars into convincing us we need disposable diapers, cups, bags, bottles, shampoo sachets and ultra-processed foods. In investigating how we got here, Consumed arms us to make better decisions about where we go next. It is only by understanding this history that we will stop accepting the same failed solutions and demand better from the brands that got us hooked on plastic in the first place.