_________________ 'BRITAIN'S FINEST LIVING NATURE WRITER' - THE TIMES WINNER OF THE THWAITES WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2015 What really goes on in the long grass? Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow's life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren, the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first page to last.

In 1037, a senior civil servant of the Byzantine empire faces a tedious journey to Greece, escorting the Army payroll. His only companions are a detachment of the Empire's elite Guard, recruited from Viking Scandinavia. When the wagon sheds a wheel, he passes the time talking with two veterans, who have a remarkable story to tell; the Viking discovery of America.As he records the story, years later, he also considers its effect on the fourth member of the party; a young Norwegian guardsman who went on to become King Harald Hardradi, who died invading England in 1066 ...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature In an astonishing book-length sequence, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey. Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here, too, is a worldly Circe, a divided Odysseus, and a shrewd adolescent Telemachus. Through these classical figures, Meadowlands explores such timeless themes as the endless negotiation of family life, the cruelty that intimacy enables, and the frustrating trivia of the everyday. Gluck discovers in contemporary life the same quandary that lies at the heart of The Odyssey: the "unanswerable/affliction of the human heart: how to divide/the world's beauty into acceptable/and unacceptable loves."

The history of the Meadowlands, from its pristine state, to its gradual transformation by European settlers, to the pollution caused by industrialization, and the changes brought by environmental organizations striving to protect it.

Celebrate the environmental restoration of the Meadowlands. For decades, New Jersey's Meadowlands have been known as mostly the home of the NFL's Giants and Jets, the place where Jimmy Hoffa is purportedly buried, or a wasteland that you passed through on your way somewhere else. Until recently, that reputation was deserved. The land was blighted with unregulated landfills and the Hackensack River so polluted that barnacles couldn't survive. Today, though, the 30.4-square-mile region has made a remarkable comeback. Located in Bergen and Hudson Counties and just five miles from Manhattan, the Meadowlands is a prime destination for birders, kayakers, and other nature lovers. In words and images, The Nature of the Meadowlands illuminates the region's natural and unnatural history, from its darkest days of a half-century ago to its amazing environmental revival. This is a great resource and beautiful keepsake for residents and visitors, tourists of New Jersey, nature lovers, and history buffs.

The Sunday Times Bestseller. Winner of the Thwaites Wainwright Prize 2015. BBC Radio 4's 'Book of the Week' Traditional ploughland is disappearing. Seven cornfield flowers have become extinct in the last twenty years. Once abundant, the corn bunting and the lapwing are on the Red List. The corncrake is all but extinct in England. And the hare is running for its life. Written in exquisite prose, The Running Hare tells the story of the wild animals and plants that live in and under our ploughland, from the labouring microbes to the patrolling kestrel above the corn, from the linnet pecking at seeds to the seven-spot ladybird that eats the aphids that eat the crop. It recalls an era before open-roofed factories and silent, empty fields, recording the ongoing destruction of the unique, fragile, glorious ploughland that exists just down the village lane. But it is also the story of ploughland through the eyes of man who took on a field and husbanded it in a natural, traditional way, restoring its fertility and wildlife, bringing back the old farmland flowers and animals. John Lewis Stempel demonstrates that it is still possible to create a place where the hare can rest safe.

Breaking down the structure of the photograph as truth and the book as narrative, Joshua Lutz's second monograph, HESITATING BEAUTY, it is an intimate portrait unlike other photographic models. Rethinking how photographs and text can function, Lutz blends family archives, interviews and letters with his own photographic practice seamlessly into a precious, fictitious experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Instead of showing us what it looks like, HESITATING BEAUTY is able to play with our own conceptions of reality to show us what it feels like. Joshua Lutz: ""Holding on so tightly to what I believed was sanity and being consumed by fear of depression and schizophrenia prevented me from being fully present to my mother's reality. The past few years, as she slipped away from the aggressive paranoia and depression of my youth to an almost calming sense of delusion, made it much easier for me to rid the anger that veiled my life and attempt to find a place of empathy and compassion as I managed her care. In making this work and simultaneously falling deeper into her psychosis, I tried to imagine a time when the past, present, and future collided; a place where the weight of memory is heavier than reality.""

Poetry. Environmental Studies. Pamela Hughes' MEADOWLAND TAKE MY HAND is both an elegy for the continued loss of the land and an exploration of the toxic and playful. Along the track of this eco-adventure, from mountainous landfills and industrial wastelands to the low key beauty of mudflats, the swaying green give of the wetlands along a backdrop of Manhattan's fixed silver horizon, readers will discover the "order of the odor" and "the dank inside of adventure." Narrative and lyric poetry mark the way through the Meadowlands, where loss and hope abide.

Determined to escape his stagnant life in a New England mill town, Timothy allows himself to be willingly enslaved at a lush estate by a mysterious man known only as Montclair, where his most sensual fantasies and deepest fears become real as he succumbs to his master's every wish and desire. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.