A magical book

The birds' nests in Susan Ogilvy's new book are beautifully painted in watercolour and at life-size... The shapes of her paintings, as of the nests themselves, are each different. They are also clearer than photographs could have been - you can almost feel you're holding them in your hand. This is an enchanting book

This is the most beautiful, treasure-like book, a collection of exquisitely painted discarded bird nests accompanied by highly informative text. The nests are life-sized and Ogilvy's beautiful work is minutely detailed, so you can really see every last bit of twig and moss. The variety is extraordinary and the birds' building styles even more so... A really wonderful book

A gem of a book

A cool, clean ruffle of winter air. Ranging across almost 30 species, it is an illustrated guide to the nests Ogilvy discovered around her home. Like Tracey Emin's bed, avian housekeeping reveals a lot about the species in question

[A] timely and ruminative novel.

Testing Christian ethics against post-religious eco-panic in a picturesque English novel makes this an unusual and fascinating read. At first it seems like a simple domestic dramedy about a grumpy husband and his eye-rolling wife. But Bray is on a real philosophical quest here and, in common with all great writers, isn't afraid to have her characters say clever things and get into unusual situations. There is no whimsy here. No cheap, easy imagery (crows, I'm talking about you). This is a powerful and truthful story about hope and how to find it. Eschatology with rabbits and needlecraft. It's intelligent, truly timely and subtly reassuring.

Bray's satire shines with observation and subtlety . . . With sharp wit, Bray teases out the tiny domestic dramas, identifying the pinch points that can make the most solid relationships briefly or permanently unendurable. Bray shows how the most well-regulated household can still tremble on the brink of collapse. What message could be more timely than that?

Beautifully-written ... superb on family dynamics.

It's bleak and it's laugh-out-loud funny, and just how Bray balances a book along that fine line is a wonderful skill.

When the Lights Go Out is a triumph. Richly metaphorical, impeccably dramatised, beautifully plotted, and so lifelike it seems to lift off the page . . . It has voices: Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, Edgar Alan Poe, Dylan Thomas and the Bible. It has ghosts: of Eden, Job, the Flood and Judgement Day. It has Christmas carols, closing down notices, protest slogans and commandments written in stone. It takes place at a tangent to the world we currently inhabit and we wake from reading it as if from a dream. The dream is that the world is ending and we are in need of a miracle. The book is a small miracle itself. Carys Bray has given us a perfect example of how to write a novel.

In a literary landscape in which cultural and political "timeliness" too often trumps artistry, it is a relief to discover there are still novels being written that confront the great questions of the day with nuance, skill and artistry.

When the Lights Go Out is absolutely superb. So timely, and so deeply human, a novel which takes us right into the heart of a marriage and at the same time grapples with the most crucial issue of our age. It's bursting with compassion and wisdom - I felt for these characters every step of the way.

Carys Bray is extraordinarily skilled at creating characters who feel like they might live down the road from you. Through exquisite use of language and observation, she examines the intricacies of family life in ways which have you laughing one moment and biting your nails with worry the next.

A sharply observed, deftly told tale of rupture and repair. In it, with characteristic wit and humanity, Bray shows us the necessity and the impossibility of preparing for disaster, and reminds us of both the fragility and capacity of love.

A beautifully realised story of a family falling apart under the pressures of our age.

Warm, witty and well worth your time.

A joy to read [...] her writing is really smart. The family's interactions are so well observed.

Bray's third novel is the finely drawn story of a marriage on the skids and a nuanced appraisal of the variegated impacts of climate change.

A very funny book . . . prescient and poignant . . . [with] a believable and moving climax to a novel that captures the paranoia of our times.

Propulsive, penetrating new novel about race, class, and climate change.

A very funny book.

A tremendously witty and enjoyable read

An absolutely gripping adventure story, exploring back through the changing vistas of our own planet's past. Earth has been many different worlds over its planetary history, and Thomas Halliday is the perfect tour guide to these past landscapes, and the extraordinary creatures that inhabited them. Otherlands is science writing at its very finest

Otherlands is one of those rare books that's both deeply informative and daringly imaginative. It will change the way you look at the history of life, and perhaps also its future

This stunning biography of our venerable Earth, detailing her many ages and moods, is an essential travel guide to the changing landscapes of our living world. As we hurtle into the Anthropocene, blindly at the helm of this inconstant planet, Halliday gives us our bearings within the panorama of deep time. Aeons buckle under his pen: the world before us made vivid; the paradox of our permanence and impermanence visceral. Wonderful

Stirring, surprising and beautifully written, Otherlands offers glimpses of times so different to our own they feel like parallel worlds. In its lyricism and the intimate attention it pays to nonhuman life, Thomas Halliday's book recalls Rachel Carson's Under the Sea Wind, and marks the arrival of an exciting new voice

Imaginative

This study of our prehistoric earth is "beyond cinematic", James McConnachie says. "It could well be the best book I read in 2022

It's phenomenally difficult for human brains to grasp deep time. Even thousands of years seem unfathomable, with all human existence before the invention of writing deemed 'prehistory', a time we know very little about. Thomas Halliday's book Otherlands helps to ease our self-centred minds into these depths. Moving backwards in time, starting with the thawing plains of the Pleistocene (2.58 million - 12,000 years ago) and ending up in the marine world of the Ediacaran (635-541 mya), he devotes one chapter to each of the intervening epochs or periods and, like a thrilling nature documentary, presents a snapshot of life at that time. It's an immersive experience, told in the present tense, of these bizarre 'otherlands', populated by creatures and greenery unlike any on Earth today

Each chapter of this literary time machine takes us further back in prehistory, telling vivid stories about ancient creatures and their alien ecologies, ending 550 million years ago

The largest-known asteroid impact on Earth is the one that killed the dinosaurs 65?million years ago, but that is a mere pit stop on Thomas Halliday's evocative journey into planetary history in Otherlands. Each chapter of this literary time machine takes us further back into the deep past, telling vivid stories about ancient creatures and their alien ecologies, until at last we arrive 550?million years ago in the desert of what is now Australia, where no plant life yet covers the land. Halliday notes the urgency of reducing carbon emissions in the present to protect our settled patterns of life, but adds: "The idea of a pristine Earth, unaffected by human biology and culture, is impossible." It's an epic lesson in the impermanence of all things

The world on which we live is "undoubtedly a human planet", Thomas Halliday writes in this extraordinary debut. But "it has not always been, and perhaps will not always be". Humanity has dominated the Earth for a tiny fraction of its history. And that History is vast. We tend to lump all dinosaurs, for example, into one period in the distant past. But more time passed between the last diplodocus and the first tyrannosaurus than has passed between the last tyrannosaurus and the present day. A mind-boggling fact. This is a glorious, mesmerising guide to the past 500 million years bought to life by this young palaeobiologist's rich and cinematic writing

A book that I really want to read but haven't yet bought - so I hope it goes into my Christmas stocking - is Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday. It sounds so amazing - a history of the world before history, before people. He's trying to write the history of the organisms and the plants and the creatures and everything else as the world grows from protozoic slime or whatever we emerged from. It sounds like an absolutely incredible effort of imagination. I think that Christmas presents should be books you can curl up with and get engrossed in and transported by - and Otherlands sounds like exactly that

But, of course, not all history is human history, Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday, casts its readers further and further back, past the mammoths, past the dinosaurs, back to an alien world of shifting rock and weird plants. It is a marvel