Discover the beauty of the natural world through the power of words with Wild Reads, our annual project in partnership with Suffolk Wildlife Trust.
Take a look at our chosen nature-themed titles for this year’s project. All free to borrow with your library card!
You can see the full book collection at our libraries in Bury St Edmunds, Woodbridge, Brandon and Southwold.
A Flat Place
Noreen Masud
Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father’s car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she’s discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Orkney. These bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma.
Noreen suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety.
Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain’s flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.
Haweswater
Sara Hall
In a remote dale in a northern English county, a centuries-old rural community has survived into the mid-1930s almost unchanged.
But then Jack Liggett drives in from the city, the spokesman for a Manchester waterworks company with designs on the landscape for a vast new reservoir.
The dale must be evacuated, flooded, devastated; its water pumped to the Midlands and its community left in ruins. Liggett further compounds the village’s problems when he begins a troubled affair with Janet Lightburn, a local woman of force and character who is driven to desperate measures in an attempt to save the valley.
What the Wild Sea Can Be
Helen Scales
No matter where we live, ‘we are all ocean people’, Helen Scales observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean.
Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how prehistoric ocean ecology holds lessons for the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomize current increasingly challenging conditions, from emperor penguins to sharks and orcas.
Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations. Astonishing giant kelp and sea grass forests, rivaling those on land, are being regenerated and expanded, while efforts to reengineer coral reefs for a warmer world are growing.
Reservoir 13
Jon McGregor
Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England.
The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home.
Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed.
The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must.
Precious Bane
Mary Webb
Born at the time of Waterloo in the wild country of Shropshire, Prudence Sarn is a wild, passionate girl, cursed with a hare lip — her ‘precious bane’.
Cursed for it, too, by the superstitious people amongst whom she lives. Prue loves two things: the remote countryside of her birth and, hopelessly, Kester Woodseaves, the weaver.
The tale of how Woodseaves gradually discerns Prue’s true beauty is set against the tragic drama of Prue’s brother, Gideon, a driven man who is out of harmony with the natural world.
Raising Hare
Chloe Dalton
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention.
Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end. This happened to me.
When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself custodian of a newly born hare. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival.
‘Raising Hare’ chronicles their journey together and the challenges of caring for the leveret and preparing for its return to the wild.
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