A fine book… Transparent, undeceived prose

Compelling … well-contextualised, sharply-observed, clued up, environmentally aware and deeply researched

With clarity and candour, in the natural voice of a modern storyteller, she tells what she sees at the intersection of herself and whatever is delivered to her by the tide

Sprackland has a wonderfully curious eye

Simply gorgeous ... One of the finest piece of writing, nature or otherwise, to emerge this year

If a book can have the appeal of a really good long walk, this one does

Lovely travelogue

Elegant

A delightful book

You want to take your time to luxuriate in the beautiful prose and get lost within the literary references, ambling through it all in your own time, much like Dee does in his four fields. A great read.

The inventive, constantly surprising spontaneity of Dee’s style, and his dazzling range of lore and learning is so pleasurable… In this beautiful book, Dee makes the grass sing both for natural joy and global warning.

A hymn to what [Dee] calls ‘the bend and give of life’, to the vistas opened up by a loving, intelligent, curious sensibility and to a belief in the virtues of looking. It is, in that way, an education in how to be.

A loving investigation into the pastoral… The language is almost overwhelmingly rich and ripe, full of tumbling wordplay… This is virtuosic beyond the merely visual, its aesthetic power drawn from Dee’s sense of deep time, his ability to interweave the natural, historical and cultural into one dense and lovely tapestry.

Tim Dee is a superb writer. This is lyrical, enchanting, thoughtful reading.

It’s a brilliant idea and the book is as passionate, lyrical and intelligent as Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.

With a lyricism richly and strangely his own, Dee maps a topography that has as much to do with the mind as with Earth.

Strikingly original… Insightful, poetic and evocative.

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