Coming Soon

At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body.

We all live on nature’s doorstep, but we often overlook it. From backyards to local parks, the natural places we see the most may well be the ones we know the least. In Close to Home, biologist Thor Hanson shows how retraining our eyes reveals hidden wonders just waiting to be discovered. Close to Home is a hands-on natural history for any local patch of Earth. It shows that we each can contribute to science and improve the health of our planet. And even more, it proves that the wonders of nature don’t lie in some far-off land: they await us, close to home.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship.

Intertidal asks us to reimagine values to live by; heeding the natural world, attending to the climate's calling, and moving away from the old political and cultural values that have proven ecologically disastrous. Set in beaches, marshes, and the wild places of the mind, Intertidal revels in the healing power of nature and explores what it means to reclaim an ecology that has been colonised.

In the woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa, sometime deep in our species’ past, something strange happened: a bird called out, not to warn others of human presence, but to call attention to herself. Having found a beehive, that bird—a honeyguide—sought human aid to break in. The behavior can seem almost miraculous: How would a bird come to think that people could help her? Isn’t life simply bloodier than that? As Rob Dunn argues in The Call of the Honeyguide, it isn’t.

A connection to nature is vital to our wellbeing. The sound of birds, the smell of tree oils, the effects of natural sunlight. Studies have shown that patients who can observe a natural scene through a hospital window recover faster, and lockdown proved that when most other aspects of life falls away, nature still feels like a necessity, not a luxury. But the majority of the world’s population lives in some form of urban environment, and by 2050, two thirds of humanity – nearly 7 billion people – are expected to live in towns and cities.

In Birdland, journalist and lifelong twitcher Jon Gower explores our intimate connection with the bird life around us. From the symphonic song of the wren to the clack of a puffin’s beak and from epic migrations to sunset murmurations, birds are commonplace miracles. No wonder they have inspired our artists, writers and songwriters. Whether rare or abundant, Jon Gower visits some of the best places in Britain to watch birds, searching for some species he has always wanted to see such as wryneck, dotterel and barred warbler.