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Placing Hampshire’s New Forest front and centre of a beguiling blend of childhood memoir, nature writing and conservation polemic, Ansell’s beautifully wrought prose fashions a work of transcendent beauty.
Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021
From a 2018 Wainwright Prize shortlisted author, The Circling Sky is part childhood memoir, blended with exquisite nature observation, and the story of one man's journey over a year to one of the UK's key natural habitats, the New Forest of Hampshire
In the form of several journeys, beginning in January 2019, Neil Ansell returns for solitary walks to the New Forest in Hampshire, close to where he was born. With beautiful sightings and observations of birds, trees, butterflies, insects and landscape, this is also a reflective memoir on childhood, on the history of one of the most ancient and important natural habitats in the United Kingdom, and on the Gypsies who lived there for centuries - and were subsequently expelled to neighbouring cities. It is also part polemic on our collective and individual responsibility for the land and world in which we live, and how we care for it
As Neil Ansell concludes so eloquently, 'Evolution has no choice in what it does, but we do, as a species, if not always as individuals'.
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group
ISBN: 9781472272362
Number of pages: 352
Weight: 560 g
Dimensions: 146 x 232 x 28 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'A beautiful evocation of life in a forest and a powerful reminder of the interconnected fate of all wild things, including ourselves' - Raynor Winn
'Like taking a refreshing and eye-opening walk in the open air with the most interesting, observant and companionable of guides. In The Circling Sky Neil Ansell reveals the remarkableness of the relatively unexotic New Forest, moving deftly from personal reflection to beautiful nature writing, to a crucial, timely argument about the history and importance of common land.' - Naomi Ishiguro
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