YA readers looking for real-life examples of humans living alongside nature can turn to Gavin Maxwell’s memoir. Originally published in 1960, Maxwell’s story about living with a trio of otters on the remote west coast of Scotland is a beautiful and poignant reminder about the power of connecting with animals.
Read our Librarian’s top climate choices for Young Adults here
The Arctic treeline is the frontline of climate change, where the trees have been creeping towards the pole for fifty years. These vast swathes of forests, which encircle the north of the globe in an almost unbroken green ring, comprise the world’s second largest biome.
Scientists are only just beginning to understand the astonishing significance of these northern forests for all life on Earth. Six tree species – Scots pine, birch, larch, spruce, poplar and rowan – form the central protagonists of Ben Rawlence’s story. In Scotland, northern Scandinavia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland, he discovers what these trees and the people who live and work alongside them have to tell us about the past, present and future of our planet.
At the treeline, Rawlence witnesses the accelerating impact of climate change and the devastating legacies of colonialism and capitalism. But he also finds reasons for hope. Humans are creatures of the forest; we have always evolved with trees. The Treeline asks us where our co-evolution might take us next. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Treeline is a blend of nature, travel and science writing, underpinned by an urgent environmental message.
This Selected Poems celebrates Scotland’s most distinctive contemporary writer – a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist.
“The Threadbare Coat is a beautiful production, and an interesting selection” ~ Rupert Loydell
Stride Magazine Praise for Thomas A. Clark: “In short, one-breath clusters of lines, Clark meditates on the details one might observe during a contemplative and solitary walk through remote countryside. His diction is perfectly pitched and his grammar exact…this is about a man’s spiritual need for the humblest manifestations of nature.”
Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021. Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020.
Jen Hadfield’s new collection is an astonished beholding of the wild landscape of her Shetland home, a tale of hard-won speech, and the balm of the silence it rides upon. The Stone Age builds steadily to a powerful and visionary panpsychism: in Hadfield’s telling, everything – gate and wall, flower and rain, shore and sea, the standing stones whose presences charge the land – has a living consciousness, one which can be engaged with as a personal encounter.
The Stone Age is a timely reminder that our neurodiversity is a gift: we do not all see the world the world in the same way, and Hadfield’s lyric line and unashamedly high-stakes wordplay provide nothing less than a portal into a different kind of being. The Stone Age is the work of a singular artist at the height of her powers – one which dramatically extends and enriches the range of our shared experience.