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: Non-Fiction


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Gardening History History Nature & pets Technology Travel


Jonathan Bate The Garden: Our 4000- Year Quest for Paradise


William Collins, 22nd, £26, HB, 9780008610555


Every gardener needs something horticultural to read as the days grow darker and damper and this richly illustrated treasure is my top choice this fall. From the gardens of Eden and Gethsemane to Capability Brown and New York’s High Line, the eminent writer on Shakespeare and much more besides takes a glorious journey through gardens both real and of the literary imagination. There is so much to ponder, not least Bate’s reminder of the importance of gardening in sympathy with nature. “One tends a garden not just for personal pleasure, but as a guardian of a tiny piece of Earth.”


Sarah Clegg Perilous


Enchantment Granta, 8th, £18.99, HB, 9781803512839


If the fairies of your imagination are sparkly Tinker Bell ones, then it is time you moved over to the fairy dark side. From elf fires in Iceland and an Irish burial mound to the stream in Cottingley where two sisters created a fairy hoax and a modern-day fairy ball in Los Angeles, Clegg explores the true history of fairies with all its disturbing ambiguity and sometimes downright menace, examining how fairy myths grew and spread across Europe, and why, in these romantasy times, we are still so in thrall to the fae. An enchanting book with a particularly witty use of footnotes.


Nick Hayes The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England


Allen Lane, 1st, £25, HB, 9780241731321


Centred on the Hardwick estate in Oxfordshire and the remarkable community of farmers and craftspeople making it the first stately home to transition from the aristocracy into the hands of the people who care for it, the writer, artist and co-founder of Right to Roam presents a striking exploration of the struggle between ownership and belonging in England. Contemplating what we lost when our sense of kinship with the land and the knowledge that arose from it was commodified and destroyed, he argues that by showing willingness to learn from cultures we have historically exploited, we might yet re-discover that kinship.


Ben Dark


Green Kingdom: The Family History of Plants


Bodley Head, 29th, £30, HB, 9781847928337


We are often so focused on the aesthetic appeal of plants that we forget just how awesome and strange and diverse and ingenious they actually are. Tracing 16 different plant families back to their roots, this marvellous book by historian, broadcaster and former head gardener Dark recasts the epic story of the kingdom of plants as a kind of dynastic drama. He shows how its staggering variety has developed since the first plants on land 484 million years ago, taking in the heritage stories of a wealth of green marvels, from iridescent buttercups to desert succulents that live for millennia.


Kevin Roose The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence Simon & Schuster, 8th, £22, HB, 9781398555310


Based on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, New York Times columnist Roose reconstructs the decade in which Artificial General Intelligence transformed from a fringe scientific ambition into a trillion-dollar global competition, providing a gripping account of the race to create a new form of intelligence that could either save humanity or destroy it… depending on the extent to which we come to our senses. Given the subject, it is a miracle this book also manages to be highly engaging, with S&S drawing comparisons with the work of Michael Lewis and Patrick Radden Keefe.


Simon Parker


The Wild Ride Home Duckworth, 15th, £22, HB, 9780715656594


I much enjoyed Parker’s illuminating and topical 2024 travelogue A Ride Across America. Though set much closer to home as a consequence of him now having a baby daughter, this new outing charts another epic journey: his gruelling quest to cycle through all 15 of the UK’s national parks, in the 75th anniversary year of the first one being founded in the Peak District. What follows as he meets others craving space, fresh air and natural beauty in the astonishingly varied and increasingly fragile landscapes of our small island is another thoughtful, 360-degree portrait of a nation in flux.


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ANNA MCCARTHY


Books New Titles: Fiction


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