The East Country: Almanac Tales of Valley and Shore

The East Country is a work of creative nonfiction in which the acclaimed nature writer Jules Pretty integrates memoir, natural history, cultural critique, and spiritual reflection into a single compelling narrative. Pretty frames his book around Aldo Leopold and his classic Sand Country Almanac, bringing Leopold’s ethic-that so The East Country, like all accomplished works of close ecological focus, moves cleverly between the intensely local and the universal. Jules Pretty unites his two distinguished careers-as a biologist and as a writer in the broad fields of nature, place and landscape-to encourage ‘long attachments to the local’ as profoundly valuable undertakings. -Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways and Landmarksme could live without nature but most should not-into the twenty-first century. In The East Country, Pretty follows the seasons through seventy-four tales set in a variety of landscapes from valley to salty shore. Pretty convinces us that we should all develop long attachments to the local, observing that the land can change us for the better.