With the warmer weather arriving in Australia, along with a hunger for outdoor explorations, now is an ideal time to reconnect with nature. Here are eight recent books to help you do so.

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

The Wild Silence is the highly anticipated follow-up to Raynor Winn’s moving memoir, The Salt Path, in which she described her and her husband Moth’s transformative journey walking the South West Coast Path in England following a heartbreaking diagnosis and homelessness. Now, Raynor shares what happened next: a difficult return to mainstream life, an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story, an opportunity to breathe life back into a beautiful but neglected farmhouse nestled deep in the Cornish hills. The Wild Silence is a luminous story of hope triumphing over despair.

Losing Eden by Lucy Jones

In this powerful work, acclaimed journalist Lucy Jones asks what happens when we lose our bond with the natural world. Travelling from forest schools in East London, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, via Poland’s primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists’ couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. Losing Eden is a provocative inquiry into how nature enriches the human psyche – and of the startling risks we face in leaving it behind.

Wild Nature by John Blay

Wild Nature is an epic journey of discovery into the heart of a vast and contested Australian wilderness. In it, John Blay laces up his walking boots and goes bush to explore Australia’s rugged southeast forests – stretching from Canberra to the coast and on to Wilsons Promontory – in a great circle from his home in Bermagui. Along the way Blay asks the big questions. What do we really know about these wild forests? How did the forests come to be the way they are? What is the importance of wild nature to our civilisation?

English Pastoral by James Rebanks

As a boy, James Rebanks’s grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. English Pastoral is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral. Not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

In this transcendent essay collection, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches. Moving and frank, personal and political, Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us.

From Snow to Ash by Anthony Sharwood

At the start of the fiery Australian summer of 2019/20, Anthony Sharwood set off on a journey. Abandoning his post on a busy news website, he solo-trekked the Australian Alps Walking Track – Australia’s most gruelling and breathtakingly beautiful mainland hiking trail. The journey started in a blizzard and ended in a blaze. Along the way, this lifelong mountain lover comes to realise that nothing would ever be the same, either for him or for the imperilled Australian Alps. From Snow to Ash is an incredible, inspiring story for anyone who dreams of iconic wilderness walks.

The Oak Papers by James Canton

We no longer build our houses from the sturdy oak and its relatives, nor use them to fuel our fires or grind their seeds and nuts into flour in times of famine. Yet, these ancient trees have a hold over us nonetheless. The Oak Papers is the story of one such tree – the Honywood Oak. Colossal and wizened, it would have been a sapling when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. James Canton spent two years sitting with and studying this unique tree, and in this stunning, meditative treatise, he examines our long-standing relationship with trees, a material as well as a source of myth and legend, and of solace.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes a dazzling journey into the concealed geographies of the ground beneath our feet – the hidden regions beneath the visible surfaces of the world. From the vast below-ground mycelial networks by which trees communicate, to the ice-blue depths of glacial moulins, and from North Yorkshire to the Lofoten Islands, he traces an uncharted, deep-time voyage. Now available in a smaller and more portable edition, this award-winning work of nature writing is a firm favourite among Readings staff and customers.