This is a book for anyone who grew up with pop music, listens to it still and has spent too much time thinking about it and talking about it. But it’s also a book about love and loss and middle age and looming mortality, written with grace and the driest imaginable humour. I’m not sure I can recommend it highly enough

A deft and heartfelt exploration of music, silence, adolescence, English pop and the emotional consequences of serious illness, and above all a discussion of something modern culture has very nearly lost touch with - the idea, and the desirability, of taste.

In a story told with warmth, wit, candour and dry, self-deprecating humour and without a whiff of self-pity... Coleman is insightful and convincing in his musings on music's emotional impact, funny in his recollections of the pains of growing up and sharp in his analysis of the thorny issue of musical 'taste'

Coleman is a spirited person, who writes with an irresistible Hornby-esque skip in his style... funny and admirable

A beautiful, elegiac ballad. Coleman writes elegantly and movingly of his youth, of growing up and of his intimate relationship with an art form that has shaped his memories

Wonderful

A rites-of-passage memoir refracted through key sonic experiences...a de profundis roar of anger and bafflement as the randomness of what has befallen Coleman prompts fundamental questions: Who am I? How am I? What the hell happens now?

A smart, witty and gentle memoir of music and adolescence and beyond

Fascinating book... It’s beautifully written, moving and, coming from 1970s, Yes-loving prog-rocker, surprisingly moving.

Congratulations to Coleman: his private hell is now a tribute to the things he loves the most

Really a story about listening and love. Brilliant.

If The Train in the Night went no further than the list of life-changing music that drops in at the end, like an index, it would be just another retread of High Fidelity, but Nick Hornby's book is a boy's train-set in comparison to this

An autobiography through sound...a broad meditation on mortality and the resourceful defences of memory

Emotional and resonant… Sharp, funny and sad in equal measure

Written with the same passion and wit that punctuated his reviews for the likes of NME, Coleman shares his journey to reconnecting with the soundtrack of his life

I can’t tell you how good it is but I’ll try… It’s a superb analysis

A warm, witty and very candid book

The book offers experiences and, for anyone whose responsiveness to the world has slackened, a reminder of how full experience can be.

Tim Dee has a deep feeling for the natural world and an ability to celebrate it in ways that seem fresh and new.

[Dee] writes so well, and so personably, that he casts a disarming spell over his readers.

[Dee] is at once a naturalist, environmentalist, journalist, historian and diarist. Dee’s rich writing delights as he imparts his considerable research and observations about life and the state of the world

[It] belongs in the tradition of 'nature writing', but works with it too putting its beautifully written sentences in the service of description and evocation, but using them to frame a serious conversation about environmental preservation and its opposites; it’s a deeply attractive book and also an important one.

Felt very deeply and pondered very wisely, it takes four areas of the planet and tells their story in ways that bring the plight (and delight) of the earth as a whole within reach.

A lyrical, poetic reflection on our relationship with the natural world.

This profound work by Tim Dee is as creative and original as anything on the Man Booker shortlist and arguably more “useful”... The book’s reach is extraordinary.

[A] marvellous new memoir.

An enthralling and unexpected book of what we have made of the natural world

This is nature writing at its finest

With the eye of a birdwatcher and the soul of a poet, Dee meditates on our green spaces and what we have made of them

Dee’s rich writing delights as he imparts his considerable research and observations about life and the state of the world

Charged with meaning and lyrically luminous, Four Fields is an unquantifiable work – and an unmissable one