I can’t think of an England player that every supporter and player would have loved to see more with the three lions on his chest. Simon was right up there with the best that I was fortunate enough to captain.

What a player, what a man. Simon was the unsung hero in the 2005 Ashes. His crucial wickets and aggression took us over the winning line.

Simon Jones only played eighteen Test matches, but to me and most England fans he will always be a legend. His bowling during the 2005 series, against the best Australian team in history, was simply magnificent: fast, furious, swinging both ways like a deranged boomerang, and devastatingly successful. A class act.

Profoundly moving

Exceptional... reminiscent of a mud-and-grit David Peace novel.

[A] brutally honest rollercoaster of an autobiography

Numerous of the protagonists who took part in the 2005 Ashes have written books – but nothing half as gripping or revelatory as Simon Jones’s account

It is one of the most striking cricket autobiographies of recent times

The Test is one of the best [books] you are ever likely to read about that landmark series, or indeed any series… an essential read for all cricket fans

An absolutely cracking read, brutally honest, visceral, edge-of-the-seat stuff

Beautifully written, and brutally honest , memoir…provides a fascinating insight into the occasional highs and all too frequent lows of a professional sportsman’s life.

A poetic portrait of a bloody American subculture, and a knockout of a nonfiction debut

As dark and funny as anything I have read this year

Kerry Howley embarks on a quest for ecstasy delivered in an unexpected forum: MMA fights. This transfixing nonfiction narrative combines bloody play-by-play with philosophical inquiry, delivering serious punches. Welcome to the Octagon

Beautiful. It’s refreshing to read a piece of place-writing that digs so deeply and tenderly into a marginal landscape, and which (strikingly) does so using a novelist’s tools as well as a nature writer’s.

Cowen's relationship with this morsel of land is intense and honest, and described in superb prose... Not only rich and strange, but also astonishing.

When Cowen thinks of himself as an owl or a butterfly or a fox caught in a snare the book lights up... leaping over the space between animal and human as though there were no difference between us.

Cowen is without doubt one of our best current writers on landscape, on a par with Roger Deakin, Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane

Wonderful … An eerie haunting book … rendered with hair-raising, almost hallucinogenic, lyricism. Cowen moves on through the seasons of the year and the creatures of the edge land, feeling, more than observing, how the improving circumstances of animal life mirror his own climb out of darkness.

Blending natural history with a novelistic approach, Cowen revives his connection to the evocative, mysterious power of the natural world.

A luminous nature book

Very beautiful indeed... [Cowen] has all the alliterative grace and fresh metaphors of a poet

[A] poetic memoir... This apparently scrappy and overlooked piece of wasteland - a tangle of wood, meadow, field and river - proves to be, under [Cowen's] forensic and magnifying gaze, brimming with riches.

He is engrossed by his landscape, enthralled by the minutiae and evokes the same fascination in the reader