Nature Biography

In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At 26 feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: Its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory.

The John Milton Poetry Collection includes four of his most beloved works, sharing Milton's pioneering writing on everything from politics to religion. As you listen, be transported to the 17th century when political and religious tensions were high and war was imminent. Listen as Milton's works reveal his opinions on biblical themes, political division, and personal freedoms.

After travelling the whole world, can exploring a single map ever be enough? Adventurer Alastair Humphreys spends a year investigating the small map around his own home. Can this unassuming landscape, marked by the glow of city lights and the hum of busy roads, satisfy his wanderlust? Could a single map provide a lifetime of exploration?

The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the story of the largest public water project ever created - William Mulholland's Los Angeles aqueduct - a story of Gilded Age ambition, hubris, greed, and one determined man whose vision shaped the future and continues to impact us today.

On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy's finger hooked behind Axelrod's eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the same dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf.

A meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray, others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life.

A deeply moving story of the beauty and brutality of life, and death, on the world's most unpredictable and perilous mountain. Sitting just lower than Everest at 8,611 meters above sea level on the China-Pakistan border, the Savage Mountain claims the lives of even the most experienced climbers. Alongside severe altitude, the weather is notoriously volatile and the climb relentlessly steep. A staggering one in four attempts result in death on the mountain.

Nick Bullock is a climber who lives in a small, green van, flitting between Llanberis, Wales, and Chamonix in the French Alps. Tides, Nick’s second work, is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Echoes. Tides is a gripping memoir that captures the very essence of what it means to dedicate one’s life to climbing.

Ever wonder what it would be like to hike 2,174 miles from Georgia to Maine along the world’s longest continuously marked footpath? Join Marathon as he provides a humorous autobiographical account of a “real” walk in the woods. Anyone who enjoys travel or adventure will love Marathon’s story. This audiobook is required for any outdoor enthusiast and will certainly assist anyone wanting to plan an Appalachian Trail (AT) section or thru-hike. Live vicariously through this entertaining account, which is narrated by the author.

Mary Anning grew up on the south coast of England in a region rich in fossils. As teenagers, she and her brother Joseph discovered England’s first complete ichthyosaur. Poor and uneducated, Anning would become one of the most celebrated paleontologists ever, though in her time she supported herself selling by fossils and received little formal recognition. Her findings helped shape scientific thinking about extinction and prehistoric life long before Darwin published his famous work on evolution.

Without a map, navigate by the stars. Susan Tweit began learning this lesson as a young woman diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was predicted to take her life in two to five years. Offered no clear direction for getting well through conventional medicine, Tweit turned to the natural world that was both her solace and her field of study as a plant ecologist.

Simon McCartney was a young British alpinist climbing many of the hardest routes in the Alps during the late seventies, but it was a chance meeting in Chamonix in 1977 with Californian "Stonemaster" Jack Roberts that would dramatically change both their lives - and almost end Simon’s...The Bond is Simon McCartney’s story of these legendary climbs.

In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and found himself at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary”—a twenty-one-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions. Now, he unpacks what he learned about creating “good soil,” both literally and figuratively, drawing lessons from the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land. In gorgeous, transporting reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers.

From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.

In the winter of 1959, a group of nine young and experienced hikers embarked on a journey into the Ural Mountains of Russia. Although they had previously undertaken cold-weather trips, this particular expedition would tragically be their last. During their trek, the hikers encountered something unexpected in the supposedly desolate region, resulting in the demise of the entire group. The exact events of that fateful night remain unknown, but the incident has since become one of the world's most perplexing mysteries.

I Chose to Climb, first published in 1966, was Chris Bonington's first book. He was recognised then, as now, as one of the outstanding members of a brilliant generation of mountaineers. Here he describes his climbing beginnings as a teenager as well as successful ascents all over the world: the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Freney, the first British ascent of the North Face of the Eiger in 1962, Annapurna II in 1960 and in an unhappy expedition in 1961, Nuptse, the third peak of Everest.

"Bis zur Grenze gefordert können wir alle mehr, als wir wollen." Reinhold Messner hat seine Grenzen immer wieder gesucht:

Von seiner ersten Besteigung eines 3000ers als Fünfjähriger bis zur Durchquerung der Wüste Gobi mit 60 Jahren. Seine Fülle an Erfahrungen, sein Ausreizen menschlicher Leidens- und Leistungsfähigkeit, seine ehrliche Anteilnahme am Leben der Bergvölker und schließlich auch sein soziales und politisches Engagement zeichnen diesen sehr persönlichen Bericht aus.

In this memoir of a lost America, Hal Borland tells the story of his family's migration to eastern Colorado as homesteaders at the turn of the twentieth century. On an unsettled and unwelcoming prairie landscape, the Borlands build a house, plant crops, and eke out a meager existence. While life is difficult—and self-reliance is necessary with no neighbors for miles—the experience brings the family close and binds them closer to the terrible and beautiful natural patterns that govern their lives.

From the day James rescued a street cat abandoned in the hallway of his sheltered accommodation, they began a friendship which has transformed both their lives and, through the bestselling books A Street Cat Named Bob and The World According to Bob, touched millions around the world.

Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care?