Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet - Hardcover

Cocker, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224099655 ISBN 13: 9780224099653

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2014

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize
Shortlisted for the 2014 New Angle Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 Society of Biology Book Award


'After Mark Cocker’s glorious book, you will never look at a blackberry bush the same way again.'
Philip Hoare, New Statesman

In a single twelve-month cycle of daily writings Mark Cocker explores his relationship to the East Anglian landscape, to nature and to all the living things around him. The separate entries are characterised by close observation, depth of experience, and a profound awareness of seasonal change, both within in each distinct year and, more alarmingly, over the longer period, as a result of the changing climate. The writing is concise, magical, inspiring.

Cocker describes all the wildlife in the village – not just birds, but plants, trees, mammals, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, bush crickets, grasshoppers, ants and bumblebees. The book explores how these other species are as essential to our sense of genuine well-being and to our feelings of rootedness as any other kind of fellowship.

A celebration of the wonder that lies in our everyday experience, Cocker’s book emphasises how Claxton is as much a state of mind as it is a place. Above all else, it is a manifesto for the central importance of the local in all human activity.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Cocker is an author and naturalist whose fourteen books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His book Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and won the New Angle Prize for Literature in 2009. With the photographer David Tipling he published Birds and People in 2013, a massive survey described by the Times Literary Supplement as 'a major literary event as well as an ornithological one.' Our Place: Can We Save Britain's Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? was described by the Sunday Times as 'impassioned, expert and always beautifully written ... a sobering and magnificent work.' A Claxton Diary won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2019, and his most recent book, One Midsummer's Day was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Award 2023.

Edition details

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224099655
• ISBN 13: 9780224099653
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256