Adam Nicolson, The Seabird’s Cry

Update: The Seabird's Cry won the Jeffries Prize this week! Further update: it also won the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize for 2018! The subtitle to this stunning book is ‘The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers’, but it really ought to include ‘Deaths’, because I have never read such a … Continue reading Adam Nicolson, The Seabird’s Cry →

A House Full of Daughters, by Juliet Nicolson

I was in two minds about this book all the way through, and I’m still unclear how I feel about it. It’s certainly compelling, but it is three stories bundled into one narrative, and sold under the bookshelf-friendly title of yet another memoir from the Sackville-West / Nicolson dynasty. (The full title, A House Full … Continue reading A House Full of Daughters, by Juliet Nicolson →

Fantasies of the undefeated South: Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore

Lady Baltimore, by Owen Wister, is an extraordinary novel. It wasn’t written as a historical novel, but it certainly is one now: a 1905 depiction of the American South at the turn of the twentieth century, on how life would have been so much better if the South hadn’t lost the Civil War. I had to … Continue reading Fantasies of the undefeated South: Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore →

Hand me a petrel: Robert Atkinson’s Island-Going

We're in the Outer Hebrides in the 1930s in this Really Like This Book podcasts scripts catch-up, on a mad quixotic journey in the roughest of conditions to locate, observe and tag an obscure little bird called Leach’s fork-tailed petrel. Island-Going by Robert Atkinson is a classic of nature writing, of social history, and of the … Continue reading Hand me a petrel: Robert Atkinson’s Island-Going →

Adam Nicolson’s Sea-Room

Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is N, and today’s author is a Nicolson, Adam Nicolson, son of Nigel Nicolson, who was the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West (about whose novel No Signposts In The Sea I blogged about recently). Some time in the 1930s Vita saw an sale … Continue reading Adam Nicolson’s Sea-Room →