I stumbled on this book thanks to a review in the Guardian in the final weeks before the pandemic took off in 2020. Given what came later, it is perhaps not surprising that a slightly esoteric book, which seeks to define life through the death it has encountered on the way, failed to make a big splash last year, but it is a great shame that it didn't. Sprackland writes a memoir through the graveyards she has most known most intimately in her life. While on the surface a personal memoir, Sprackland's writing finds new depths (I realise how hard I am labouring this metaphor - apologies!) in the stories of the graveyard inmates, into whose lives she conducts some considerable research.
This is highly original writing, which permits its readers insight into a world of both forgotten and famous corners of Britain, and which like much of the best memoir finds an angle (and more than a few stone angels - yeah really bad, I'm sorry) to look at a life in a more profound and moving way.

The book that launched a publishing obsession. Isabella Tree's account of her and her husband's transformation of his family estate into a 'rewilded' oasis for flora and fauna is only a few years old yet has proven such a hit that other publishers have raced to put out their own books on wilding/rewilding.
This is with good reason. Once you get over the fact that Tree and her husband just happen to own thousand of acres of the best and most beautiful countryside in Britain, you discover this is a book filled with fascinating nuggets about what best to do with the countryside in the climate crisis and how to think about natural history in different ways. Among the biggest revelations to me was Tree's scepticism about the idea that closed canopy forests had once covered the whole of the UK. Her point being that if they did, there would have been no sustenance for large grazing animals. There is much much more to learn in the book itself!

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Davidson, Mark

Keeping Frogs

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