Showing titles in Rural

Brought to you by Penguin. The Charente: roofs of red terracotta tiles, bleached-white walls, windows shuttered against the blaring sun. The baker does his rounds in his battered little white van with a hundred warm baguettes in the back, while a cat picks its way past a Romanesque church, the...

When actor, playwright and comedian Seamus O'Rourke first published Standing in Gaps in 2020 it found a wide audience amongst readers in rural Ireland. With a distinct talent for seeing the absurd in the ordinary, mundane lives of people who 'had nothing better to be at' and making it hilarious, Standing in Gaps manages to turn back time and transport the listener to a place where everything moved slowly – and in the Leitrim of the '60s, '70s and '80s, that means really slowly.

"Africulture is a gift and inspiration."—Michael W. Twitty, author of the James Beard Foundation Award-winning The Cooking Gene A bold, timely history illuminating the essential contributions to U.S. agriculture arising from the expertise and innovations of Black men and women. In Africulture...

'He does write beautifully, especially of his greatest love — our wild birds...On The Marsh is a delightful read.' – Christopher Hart, Daily Mail How the rewilding of eight acres of Norfolk marshland inspired a family and brought nature even closer to home. When writer Simon Barnes heard a...

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return.

Los años 50 constituyen la época más desconocida de la historia reciente de España. Entre los terribles años 40 de la posguerra y los cambios que trajeron los 60. Manuel Espín acude al rescate de esos tiempos en La España resignada (1952-1960) para devolvernos la imagen de un país que quiere dejar atrás los terribles recuerdos de la guerra y la posguerra para empezar a mirar hacia el futuro con esperanza.

A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban. In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations, and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the 19th century to the present day.

Zoë Colville spent years in a fancy hair salon with a long list of clients, living on cigarettes, croissants, and a shoestring. It was everything she'd ever wanted. But when an unexpected and overwhelming loss caused her life to shift unexpectedly, she found herself on a different path. One where the only use for a hairdryer is warming new-born lambs; where the cycle of life on a farm gives new meaning on purpose, and where nature is both a strict teacher and a balm to soothe the pressures of everyday life.

Growing up gifted and working-class in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of learning as they navigated the challenges of their declining town and tumultuous family lives - broken marriages, shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left Clinton for university and fulfilled her dreams. Darci, along with many in their circle of friends, did not.

Brought to you by Penguin. Urgent and inspiring stories of rural Britain today, from the Sunday Times no. 1 bestselling author of Politics on the Edge Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as MP for Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part...

We may be excluded from the majority of our land, no less than 92 per cent in England, but best-selling nature writer and trespasser Nick Hayes shows how we can reclaim our lost connection. By engaging with the land through craft and learning and by caring for it, our relationship with the countryside will be better for us, and better for nature. Interwoven are testimonials from expert contributors—farmers and land workers, activists and authors—each with deeply personal stories of what a connection to nature means for them.

The author of the beloved number one best seller The Shepherd's Life returns with a stirring history of family, loss and the land over three generations on a Lake District farm. James Rebanks was taught by his grandfather to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, that landscape had profoundly changed.

'Polly Morland and Richard Baker have more than done justice to the original John Berger book - and produced a work that stimulates the eye and mind in equal measure.' Alain de Botton A Fortunate Woman is a compelling, thoughtful and insightful look at the life and work of a country doctor...

For its own very good reasons, Scotland Yard sends Dover off to remote Creedshire to investigate the disappearance of a young housemaid, Juliet Rugg. Though there's every cause to assume that she has been murdered - she gave her favours freely and may even have stooped to a bit of blackmail - no body is to be found. Weighing in at 16 stone, she couldn't be hard to overlook. But where is she? And why should Dover, of all people, be called upon to find her? Or, for that matter, even bother to solve the damned case?  

Acclaimed nature writer Neil Ansell has suffered from progressive hearing loss his whole life. As his world is becoming ever more silent, he suddenly hears something quite unexpected — the haunting call of the great northern diver. It is this extraordinary experience which makes him realise that there might still be remarkable sounds in nature within his reach — if he can only find himself in the right place at the right time. This moving book charts Neil's mission to hear rare and elusive creatures that he had not previously encountered.

Brought to you by Penguin. 1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond...

Between 1821 and 1826, the prolific writer and journalist William Cobbett travelled the countryside of the South of England on foot and horseback. Rural Rides is a fascinating account of his journeys, and depicts a way of life in transition, juxtaposing lyrical descriptions of the countryside with criticism of the poverty of agricultural workers. A man of radical politics who encouraged the rural rising of 1830, Cobbett went on to become MP for Oldham and sought to represent the interests of both industrial and agricultural workers. Above all, Rural Rides celebrates agrarian England.

As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in 20th-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers.

Brought to you by Penguin. The classic evocative tale of an idyllic childhood in the English countryside Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the...

Only a man who had lived all his life in Suffolk could produce such a vivid and accurate portrayal of Akenfield and its inhabitants. Ronald Blythe recounts the personal recollections of, among others, the local school keeper, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate as they discussed farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death. Originally published in 1969, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared.