Peat and Whisky: The Unbreakable Bond is, as one of the best-known aficionados attests, “among the most important books about whisky ever written.” Part travelogue, part popular science, and a love letter to Scotland’s most famous artisan product, Mike Billett’s account brings together landscapes, geology, ecology, history, people and their whisky, whilst also addressing an important current environmental issue: peatlands and their role in climate change.

The story of peat and its central role in the production and flavour of whisky is engagingly related through the author’s journey around Scotland and into its past – in ancient peatlands and bogs and the places where whisky has been made for centuries. It sheds light on a country and its history, especially through an oft-misunderstood component of the production of whisky. It looks back to a golden age of peat and whisky, as well as forward to a more challenging future.

As our natural resources and landscapes are increasingly contested, this is the essential read for all whisky lovers.

“Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine.” 

The relationship between horror films and the LGBTQ+ community? It’s complicated. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. There is tension here, and there are as many queer readings of horror films as there are queer people.

Edited by Joe Vallese, and with contributions by writers including Kirsty Logan and Carmen Maria Machado, the essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writers’ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jennifer’s Body.

Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously.

Rising on Lancashire’s Heald Moor, the River Calder flows through the glorious countryside of West Yorkshire until it joins the River Aire, near Castleford. Its often steep-sided valley was formed by glacial erosion of a bedrock of millstone grit and carboniferous rock, over the course of millions of years. Rich in biodiversity, the valley is home to a wonderful variety of birds, animals, trees and wildflowers. Together they form a beautiful backdrop for residents and visitors to enjoy this green sanctuary, where it’s easy to forget the world beyond.

With more than its fair share of rainfall, the valley’s rushing river was central to the industrial heyday of the Pennines, when the waterway was modified with “cuts” to form a navigable canal. The legacy of the textile industry is seen in the remaining mill and factory buildings. Today, renovated mills are popular as dwellings, and the canal is a place of leisure, where boaters, walkers and cyclists can enjoy nature’s sights and sounds.

In an old-fashioned fishing community on windswept Morecambe Bay, change is imperceptibly slow. Treacherous tides sweep the quicksands, claiming everything in their path. As a small boy, Arthur had naturally followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footprints, learning to read the currents and shifting sands.

Now retired and widowed, though, Arthur feels tired, invisible, redundant. His daughter wants him safely tucked in a home. No one listens to his rants about the ill-prepared newcomers striking out nightly onto the bay for cockles, seemingly oblivious to the danger.

When Arthur’s path crosses Suling’s, both are almost out of options. Barely yet an adult, Suling’s hopes for a better life have given way to fear: she’s without papers or money, speaks no English, and debt collectors are hunting her down. Her only choice is to trust the old man.

Combining warmth and tension and recalling a true incident, The Bay tells a tender story about loneliness, confronting prejudice, and the comfort of friendship, however unlikely—as well as exposing one of the most pressing social ills of our age.

“Evocative, muscular.” – Kathleen Jamie.

Karen Lloyd takes us on a deeply personal journey around the 60 miles of coastline that make up ‘nature’s amphitheatre’.

Embarking on a series of walks that take in beguiling landscapes and ever-changing seascapes, Karen tells the stories of the places, people, wildlife and history of Morecambe Bay. So we meet the King’s Guide to the Sands, discover forgotten caves and islands that don’t exist, and delight in the simple beauty of an oystercatcher winging its way across the ebbing tide.

As we walk with Karen, she explores her own memories of the bay, making an unwitting pilgrimage through her own past and present, as well as that of the bay. The result is a singular and moving account of one of Britain’s most alluring coastal areas.

Inhabiting a landscape, walking a landscape, writing a place and time…

For Linda Cracknell, exposure to wind, rock, mist, and salt water is integral to her writing process. She follows Susan Sontag’s advice to “Love words, agonise over sentences, and pay attention to the world,” observing and writing her landscapes from the particulars of each moment.

In this varied essay collection, Linda backpacks on a small island that is connected to the mainland only at low tide. In winter snow, she hikes the wooded hillside close to her home, a place she is intimately familiar with in all seasons. And she retraces over three days the steps of a trek made by her parents seven decades earlier. She explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work, and she offers thoughtful writing prompts.

Reading this collection will take you to new places, open your eyes to the world, and suggest ways to take note and make notes as you go—to inspire your own attentive looking, journaling, and writing practice.

What do Zen masters, sixteenth-century Samurai, and the world’s elite climbers have in common?
– They have acquired the art of awareness.

Climbing is a sport of perception, and our level of attainment is a matter of mind as much as body.

Written by philosopher, essayist, and lifelong climber Francis Sanzaro, The Zen of Climbing explores the fundamentals of successful climbing, delving into sports psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and Taoism. Awareness, he argues, is the foundation of climbing, allowing us to merge mental and physical attributes in one embodied whole.

Written by the author of the classic The Boulder: A Philosophy of Bouldering, this book puts the climber’s mind at the forefront of practice.

The personal collides with the political in this literary tour-de-force. In the 1950s, an eminent British writer pens a novel questioning the ethics of the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but soon he’s trying to outrun his own past.

Hakone, Japan, 2003. An eminent British writer in his seventies, Sir Edward Strathairn, returns to a resort in the Japanese mountains where, in his youth, he spent a beautiful, snowed-in winter.

It was there he wrote his best-selling novel, The Waterwheel, accusing America of being in denial about the horrific aftermath of the Tokyo firebombings and the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

London, England, 1952. A young Edward falls in love with an avant-garde American artist, Macy. After their tumultuous relationship and breakup, he heads for Japan, where he meets someone else and becomes smitten again as he writes the novel that makes him famous.

This is as much a thrilling romance as it is a sensitive exploration of blame, power and guilt in post-war America, Japan and Britain. With a narrator whose behaviour strikes the national conscience as much as his own, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful will stay with readers long after the final page is turned.

An intimate story of a Polish family torn apart by war: of heartbreak, loss, and survival against the odds.

Julian Czerkawski was born in 1926 near Lwow, in Polish Galicia, on a farm with fertile grain fields and orchards. He was the son of a Polish lancer—one of the famous cavalrymen who carried forward the legacy of the hussar knights.

But there would be no idyllic childhood for young Julian. Soviet annexation and then, in 1941, the German occupation of Lwow changed everything. At the age of eighteen, he was sent to a labour camp. Fortunate to escape after the war with his life, eventually he made his way to the UK. Here, he married and started a family, but an ache remained for the people and places of his childhood memories, even if he spoke of them only rarely.

In 2022, Putin’s war in Ukraine and the sight of refugees passing through Lviv—the former Polish city of Lwow—added urgency to his writer daughter Catherine’s project of a lifetime, to try to uncover for herself everything that had been lost a generation before.

The Last Lancer pieces together glimpses of how the Czerkawski family lived and died in a region with a proud but turbulent history. It sheds light on their trauma, at the same time offering a deep and very personal understanding of a troubled place.

RSPB BOOK OF THE MONTH

Singing Like Larks opens a rare window onto the ancient song traditions of the British Isles, interweaving mesmerising lyrics, folklore and colourful nature writing to uncover the remarkable relationship between birds and traditional folk music.

Birds are beloved for their song and have featured in our own music for centuries. This charming volume takes us on a journey of discovery to explore why birds appear in so many folk songs.

Today, folk songs featuring our feathered friends are themselves something of a threatened species: their melodies are fading with the passage of time, and their lyrics are often tucked away in archives. It is more important than ever that we promote awareness of these precious songs and continue to pass them down the generations. Lifetimes of wisdom are etched into the words and music, preserving the natural rhythms of nature and our connection to times past.

An important repository and treasury of bird-related folk songs, Singing Like Larks is also an account of one young nature writer’s journey into the world of folk music, and a joyous celebration of song, the seasons, and our love of birds.