A year in England's green and pleasant land, from the beloved author of Akenfield — a John Murray Classics edition with a foreword by Richard Mabey.
For a quarter of a century, Ronald Blythe wrote a weekly dispatch from Bottengoms Farm, the ancient yeoman's house at the end of a track in the Stour Valley where he lived alone with his cat and his books. Next to Nature gathers the best of those pieces into a single year, month by month: ploughing and harvest, church bells and hedgerows, old friends remembered and weather watched, the turning of seasons observed with a poet's eye and a countryman's patience.
Nothing much happens, and everything does. Blythe — who died at one hundred, having become the last great voice of the old English countryside — writes prose so companionable that readers ration it: a month's entries a night, all year round. The perfect bedside book.
This edition
- John Murray Classics series livery
- Foreword by Richard Mabey, celebrated nature writer
Perfect for readers of
James Rebanks' The Shepherd's Life, Robert Macfarlane, The Butterfly Season — and anyone who needs a gentler pace once a day.
About the author
Ronald Blythe (1922–2023) wrote Akenfield, the classic portrait of an English village, and lived nearly all his hundred years within a few miles of where he was born.
