Claxton
Author(s): Mark Cocker
This book was shortlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize. "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. This is 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.
General Information
- :
- : Vintage
- : Jonathan Cape Ltd
- : 0.445
- : 01 October 2014
- : 223mm X 147mm X 29mm
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Mark Cocker
- : Hardback
- : 1
- : 942.619
- : 256
More About The Product
After the massive, world-spanning, unanimously acclaimed Birds and People Mark Cocker looks in fascinating detail at his home parish in Norfolk and its wildlife Shortlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize
Shortlisted for Thwaites Wainwright Prize 2015. Long-listed for New Angle Prize for Literature 2015.
"After Mark Cocker's glorious book, you will never look at a blackberry bush the same way again." -- Philip Hoare New Statesman "If your eye has ever been caught by a moth, owl, jay or ash tree, Claxton has something new to tell about it, about Britain, and about life - which is an infinite compilation of exquisite detail." -- Horatio Clare, 5 stars Daily Telegraph "The book is spectacular... Brilliant natural-history writing." -- Jonathan Wright Herald "At once charming and unsentimental, these short pieces educate and delight." -- Stephanie Cross, 5 stars Lady "Cocker is a sharp-eyed, knowledgeable and accessible writer... Makes one look again at the world outdoors with renewed awe and wonder." -- Ben East Metro
Mark Cocker is an author, naturalist and environmental activist whose ten 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'.