Two pages into The Shepherd's Life, I was gripped. Twenty pages in, I was amazed. By its end, I knew I'd read an extraordinary book, at once political and beautiful - a major addition to the modern British literature of landscape, that can stand alongside Ronald Blythe's classic Akenfield as a portrait of a place and its people as seen from within

A very good book

Affectionate, evocative, illuminating. A story of survival - of a flock, a landscape and a disappearing way of life. I love this book

Bloody marvellous

A powerful - and quietly electrifying - meditation... Page by page, he builds what amounts to a 21st-century pastoral manifesto. The book is an unsentimental education, part history of farming in the Lake District, part personal memoir. And yet it still soars... Rebanks's prose is beautifully sure-footed

A remarkable achievement... Utterly unsentimental, The Shepherd's Life is, nevertheless, profoundly moving... The human values that imbue The Shepherd's Life are, perhaps, ones that Britain, disillusioned and scandal weary, could do with being reminded of right now

Rebanks's enthusiasm and talent for poetic writing is infectious... [His] words create not only a gorgeous landscape painting of the Lake District and its inhabitants, human, animal, bird and fish, but also a useful social document... What is most striking about this book is its authenticity; this is the real thing

A wonderfully detailed and candid account of a life that is both individual and typical of this role in rural society... told with perfect pitch, in prose that flows as easily as speech, cleaves hungrily to the particular, and shifts without strain between the workaday and the imaginative

Absorbing, often funny, and beautifully written... a testament to the importance of maintaining a connection to the land

Captivating... A book about continuity and roots and a sense of belonging in an age that's increasingly about mobility and self-invention. Hugely compelling

Exceptional... Rebanks's way with words is akin to that of that of an expert shearer with the clippers - swift, deft, skilled - and the resulting prose is lean, vivid, tough and handsome. I loved his book. It is one to restore faith in writing and the business of publishing - a story not like any other, told from the inside by someone whose passion for his subject lights up almost every sentence

An unforgettable survivor's book that raises important questions, not least about education... one of the most truthful depictions of contemporary rural life that I have read

More than a tribute to a rare and doughty tribe. If hills could speak, this is surely a tale the fells would tell

An enlightening, exquisitely written account... I was beguiled by this book, an eloquent love-letter to a cherished way of life

May well do for sheep what Helen Macdonald did for hawks

Punchy, well-read and occasionally lyrical... a glorious book, alive with the author's voice, which is strong and individual, as befits a man who makes a living in this ancient but precarious way. Most striking is its honesty

Rebanks offers a fascinating account of his life in farming that is in equal parts memoir, social commentary and procedural. Even for the most committed urbanite, it's a brilliant read

James Rebanks's unsentimental, sharply detailed memoir about his life as a shepherd gripped me from the first page

A timely and important book, with flashes of beauty in its spare and honest prose

In James Rebanks we hear a new voice from the fells. The toil and the beauty in The Shepherd's Life are utterly compelling

A vivid, honest, unforgettably written account not just of one shepherd's year, but of an ancient way of life

The Shepherd's Life is a reader's delight. No tourist wandering the iconic Lake District is Rebanks; coming from centuries of farmers he is as 'hefted' to the fells as the Herdwick sheep he keeps. He lives, breathes and works his landscape - which gives him an inside edge as sharp as shears over most of the flock of current countryside-writers. Rebanks has written a marvellous autobiography - of himself, his family, and the hills themselves. For they are indivisible

What came through was the stolid humility, gentle stubbornness and genuine care you need to live this life. Many books are written about a thing but this book is of a thing and is valuable for it

The Shepherd's Life is that rare thing, a well-written book about the life of the land by a man who gets his living from the land. It's a paean for a peopled landscape, and a powerful counterblast to the doleful environmentalism that would empty our land of its people

Beautifully written

Irreverent, honest, achingly beautiful and totally authentic. Rebanks challenges us to understand what would be lost if no one remembers the seasons of a shepherd's life or the culture of sheep farming. His joy is as contagious as his writing

Truly extraordinary... written with a mastery of vivid, concrete detail that makes you gasp

A wonderful book which will surely become a Lake District classic. Powerfully written and unflinchingly honest, it provides a vivid insight into the realities of hill farming life

A gorgeous book, unsentimental but exultant, vivid and profound, and a fierce defense of small-scale farming

A beautifully told tale suffused by a profound sense of belonging and a clear-eyed love of the land and its people.

His prose is earthed and conversational; it feels as if you're leaning over a gate, listening to his ruminations. The book exudes tough passion, and a sense of belonging and love that holds you rapt to the very last line

What a great idea this is...a masterpiece of time, distance, palm trees, frosty mornings, lofty ambition and self-effacing charm

A fascinating book that ought to put flight in a new light for many people

Masterly, beautifully written book

Alive with the joy of everything from takeoff…to the dream-like quality of flight itself

Marvelously literate… If [Vanhoenacker’s] book had been around in the mid-‘80s, I suspect I wouldn’t have been afraid to fly in the first place

In the pages of his book…you will find yourself agreeing that “The ordinary things we thought we knew…becomes more beautiful”

Commendably, the technical aspects are outlined in a straightforward, accessible manner, while overall the book demonstrates that aviation has lost none of its appeal

A lovely memoir

For anyone who wishes to get a pilot’s insight into what it’s really like to notch up thousands of miles and hours… – you won’t find a much more passionate account than this one

[Vanhoenacker] invites readers with him on to the flight deck, describing the minutiae of flight with a degree of detail that would be nerdy were it not for the poetry of his writing

As you battle with the cramped legroom in economy class, [Vanhoenacker’s] view of aviation may just transport you

[An] elegant meditation on being an airline pilot

[Vanhoenacker] wants us to fall in love with flying again

A highly readable account, as moving as it is unexpected, of what flying means, by an airline pilot with a gift for words. Antoine de Saint-Exupery lives again

[This] airborne odyssey of a book is enthralling, from the physics of lift and the vicissitudes of flight paths to the aura borealis and the pristine sunsets. Read it and you’ll request a window seat every time you fly

This mesmerising book will make you view the world differently

Few people have captured the fascination of flying as well as U.S. journalist and pilot Mark Vanhoenacker.

Delves deeply into the magic and beauty of flight. An elegant writer with a sharp eye and a literary mind, Vanhoenacker… Writes about flight on an emotional and spiritual level, how it makes him feel to soar above the Earth while watching the landscape pass below.

He spins a curious and articulate exploration of flying.

Vanhoenacker’s calm and scrupulously composed prose style is soothing… Vanhoenacker manages to make flying seem exciting again.

A beautiful, contemplative book… What Skyfaring gives is something we need: elevation; another perspective… Normally when I find a volume where prose style and subject matter fuse so pleasingly, I tear through it in a day. Here, I found myself pausing on almost every page, as I absorbed its detail or phrasing.

Here is the simple wonder that remains at the heart of an experience which modern travellers all too easily take for granted.

A writer of exquisite prose, fascinated both by the technical and mystical aspects of flight... In every line of this lovely book, there is something beautiful and strange.

This is the best book I've ever read on the subject... It's one of the best travel books I've ever read... Superb.

An unexpectedly lyrical memoir on a fascinating subject… Skyfaring will give you a delightfully fresh perspective on the wonder that is air travel.

It’s calm, poetic and riveting… Fascinating.

He writes beautifully about the strange, alien world of high-altitude passenger flights… Vanhoenacker loves flying and communicates beautifully its marvels and mysteries.

I loved this fabulous insight into the secret world of the sky.

A brilliant, chunky, study of genes.

This book captures the progression from that intuitive sense of genetics to its birth as a veritable science and, for better or for worse, its evolution into a powerful tool… The book ends not with a conclusion, but with a feeling of anticipation… In many ways, The Gene is a call for caution and for a thoughtful consideration of the possibilities that progress may bring… When genes become tools, what will those tools be used for? As we try to answer that question, Mukherjee’s book asks us to carefully look back before we continue to move forward

A comprehensive – and gripping – history of the gene