'This is some of the best English prose of our time' SPECTATOR 'A feast for mind and soul' ISABELLA TREE 'A marvellous and revelatory guide to our native bird-life' DAILY MAIL Step into the hide for a glorious new encounter with the British wild Close to Adam Nicolson's home in Sussex, there is a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles. It is the haunt of deer and many birds - nightingales, the occasional cuckoo, ravens, robins, owls and in summer the sweet-singing warblers that come north from Africa to breed in English woods. This gorgeous book charts his attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a marvellous layer of life he had previously almost ignored. He wanted to look and listen, to return to 'bird school' and see what it might teach him. He built a small shed amongst the trees with nesting boxes and bird feeders. Cocooned inside, season after season, he got to know the birds: where they nest, how they sing, how they mate and fight, what preys on them, what they are like as living things. Beautifully written and woven through with philosophy, literature, science and a sense of wonder, always conscious that that this is an age in which the natural world is under siege, Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, taking a long, careful and concerned look at our relationship with the wild. 'Golden threads of literary, philosophical and scientific insight run through Nicolson's book, along with a sense that we are embarking on an adventure with him into a realm that we cannot hope to fully understand' THE TIMES 'A worthy addition to a literary lineage that stretches back to the 18th-century writer and naturalist Gilbert White.

Bird School, then, is a fitting title: we should learn to rekindle our enduring love affair with birds, before they vanish from our sight' DAILY TELEGRAPH Gold title * NEW BOOK FROM PRIZE-WINNING AND BESTSELLING NATURE WRITER ADAM NICOLSON - this is him returning to his nature writing roots * HUGE SALES RECORD. TCM sales: Sea Room - 98k sales Seabird's Cry - 65k sales Mighty Dead - 52k sales Life Between the Tides - 40k sales // Sales of over 430k across all formats \\ * ADAM NICOLSON IS ONE OF THE GREATEST NATURAL HISTORY WRITERS TODAY AND A MULTI-PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR including the Wainwright Prize, Jeffries Prize, Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award and the British Topography Prize Competition: Ten Birds that Changed the World; H is for Hawk; Rebirding; The Peregrine; The Shepherd's Life; Lost Rain forests of Britain; Wildwood; Underland. Stephen Moss; Helen Macdonald; Benedict Macdonald; J.A. Baker; James Rebanks; Guy Shrubsole; Roger Deakin; Robert Macfarlane; Olivia Laing.