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, including titles by Tom Cox, Michelle Paver, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and more. All free with your library card!
You can see the full book collection at our libraries in Ipswich, Framlingham and Southwold, with a mini collection available in Saxmundham.
The Grassling
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
What fills my lungs is wider than breath could be. It is a place and a language torn, matted and melded; flowered and chiming with bones. That breath is that place and until I get there I will not really be breathing.
Spurred on by her father’s declining health and inspired by the history he once wrote of his small Devon village, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett delves through layers of memory, language and natural history to tell a powerful story of how the land shapes us and speaks to us.
‘The Grassling’ is a book about roots: what it means to belong when the soil beneath our feet is constantly shifting, when the people and places that nurtured us are slipping away.
My Life in Sea Creatures
Sabrina Imbler
În My Life in Sea Creatures we encounter: the mother octopus, starving herself while watching over her eggs; the yeti crab, thriving in crushing pressure and oppressive darkness; the cuttlefish, able to change its appearance in a fraction of a second; and many other creatures lurking in the depths of the ocean.
Imbler’s work weaves the wonders of marine biology with their own identity as a queer, non-binary mixed-race writer. They implicitly connect endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and shatter our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive.
The Lost Rainforests of Britain
Guy Shrubsole
Temperate rainforest may once have covered up to one-fifth of Britain, inspiring Celtic druids, Welsh wizards, Romantic poets, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s most loved creations. Though only fragments now remain, they are home to a dazzling variety of luminous life-forms.
In 2020, Guy Shrubsole moved from London to Devon. As he began to explore the wooded valleys, rivers and tors of Dartmoor, he discovered an extraordinary habitat that he had never come across before: temperate rainforest. Entranced, he would spend the coming months exploring and researching the history and distribution of rainforest in the British Isles. Britain, Guy discovered, was once a rainforest nation. This is the story of a unique habitat that has become so denuded and fragmented, most people today don’t realise it exists.
Villager
Tom Cox
Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into its history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life. In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill where he writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a group of obsessive fans and a cult following. Two decades later, a couple of teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling and neglected home.
Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and superfast train corridors and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor.
The Offing
Benjamin Myers
One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. 16 and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood’s Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea. Staying with Dulcie, Robert’s life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry.
The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.
Wakenhyrst
Michelle Paver
In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father. When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened. Maud’s battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father’s past.
Spanning five centuries, ‘Wakenhyrst’ is a darkly gothic thriller about murderous obsession and one girl’s longing to fly free.
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