In lyrical prose, Hamer revealed a curious kinship with moles - creatures who, like him, often work alone. Like Laurie Lee, Hamer is an elegist, attracted to what's beautiful precisely because it's poised to pass away.

From the first few words I knew I had encountered loving honesty and no one needs more than that. It is rare to encounter such respect and understanding of nature for herself.

How To Catch A Mole is a beguiling mixture: part autobiography, part handbook, part travel book, part philosophical treatise. I’m happy to report that it succeeds on each level

Not only a compelling meditation on the 'little gentleman in black velvet'…but also a fascinating, lyrical account of the loneliness and beauty of life on the margins, a memoir of vagrancy

This is a wonderful book about our relationship with the earth, with other animals and with our own troubled humanity. It has taught me a lot. I feel great love for it.

How to Catch a Mole is a beautiful, elegiac ode to a remarkable creature. It’s also an exploration of Hamer’s life as he approaches his sunset years. Each page is filled with wonder, love, regret, humility and a sense of wonder (and oneness) with nature.

[How To Catch a Mole] has the feel of an enduring classic. It is the testament of a man who has learnt to see, who has the nerve to interrogate his own annihilation and who…handles language superbly

Marc tells his story and explores what moles, and a life in nature, can tell us about our own humanity and our search for contentment.

[Hamer] offers us some heart-rending images which linger in the mind long after you’ve closed the book

Marc Hamer's uplifting writings shed some light on the velvety creatures burrowing beneath our countryside.

Marc Hamer's wonderful How To Catch A Mole took me completely by surprise. It certainly is a book about
catching moles but it is also a book of sound philosophy, poignant biography and a zen-like meditation on life and nature. Brilliant.

The wisdom contained in this elegiac and intensely moving book doesn't need embellishing

It's not often you meet a mole-catcher, let alone read their story. Marc Hamer's uplifting writings shed some light on the velvety creatures burrowing beneath our countryside

[A] distinctive, quietly revelatory, book…a somewhat unlikely interplay of Hamer’s easeful poetry and observations with accounts of both the specialist life of moles and his own biography. Skilfully woven with eloquent simplicity, it offers a rich and sustained meditation on the task of apprehending the complex and delicate interconnectedness of life and land

A distinctive, quietly revelatory book... a rich and sustained meditation on the task of apprehending the complex and delicate interconnectedness of life and land. Its pages have much to teach us.

A beguiling mixture of autobiography, practical handbook and philosophical treatise

[A] wholly original book

A haunting memoir... [Hamer] writes of them [moles] and their underground lives with deep knowledge and tenderness, finding in their solitary habits an echo of his own vagrant nature

One of this century's greatest nature writers, Helen Macdonald takes simple moments - of nesting birds, wild boars emerging from the woods, foraging for mushrooms on an autumn day - and weaves them with history, personal reflection and political comment.

H is for Hawk turned many a reader into a goshawk fan... This lyrical essay collection also explores human relationships with the natural world, but has a wider scope, taking in a search for the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests and swan-upping on the Thames.

Vesper Flights...reminds us we too are part of the natural world.

Vesper Flights...[takes] the reader on exhilarating adventures.

This nature writer's long-awaited follow-up to her influential 2014 memoir H is for Hawk is a treat: dive into essays about headaches and high-rises, catching swans and farming ostriches.

Their subject matter is marvellously diverse, taking in nests, ants, hares, glow-worms, mushrooms, migration and more... These are urgent pieces designed to open our eyes to the state of the environment.

Vesper Flights is a book of tremendous purpose.

Gorgeously evocative prose, original insights and deep knowledge.

[Macdonald's] beautifully written essays go a long way to improving our perception.

A collection of wonderfully evocative essays on wildlife.

[An] urgently beautiful book about the haunted meanings of belonging in the world.

Stunning.

Vesper Flights weaves a beautiful proposition: by noticing how wonder arises and flows, we can learn something about what it means to be alive.

These individual essays are about badgers and ants, goldfinches and swans, but through their constellation Macdonald is able to get at something fundamental about the human condition.

I should have started reading Helen Macdonald a long time ago and now I'm unlikely to stop. These essays and reflections are just as compelling as her celebrated H is for Hawk, and come together as a kind of manual for being in the world as you look at it.

Lovely, thoughtful and sometimes sobering essays on the vanishing natural world.

This book is a powerful - and entertaining - corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species.

Macdonald has a wonderful gift for exploring the intersection between nature and our experience of it, in writing that is both lyrical and impassioned.