Lost Summers & Half forgotten Afternoons

Jo Burt's comic strips detailing the adventures of Mint, a mountain-biking sheep, have amused and delighted readers for over three decades. Join Mint as he rides through an enchanting, bucolic world in which Death stalks the whaleback hills of the South Downs and Summer is a beautiful, capricious goddess.

Cheerfully wistful, wilfully surreal and obsessively detailed, Mint Sauce covers the broad gamut of existence, with ungulates on bikes the backdrop to love, loss, death, the weather, joy, sadness and some more weather.

Jo Burt has been drawing the Mint Sauce cartoon since 1987 and this is the first time it has ever been collected in a book. Featuring a new six-page story, a selection of classic strips from 1987-2023, calendar images, plus commentary and an introduction by Jo.

"Cartoons are an odd thing. On the one hand, they are brief, ephemeral, enjoyed for a short minute and thrown away. On the other, they can resonate and be stuck on the fridge, remembered, loved, kept close, and somehow become a tiny touchstone in your life."

"Mint has always been about gently immersing yourself within the landscape and experiencing all of what that may bring. Mud, brambles, rain, the odd glimpse of sunshine, roots, nettles, and very immovable trees. And a necessary stillness. While others might see mountain biking as a way of owning something or smashing it Mint has always seen a ride as a way to disappear, dissolve into the hill and become an intimate and quiet part of the scenery."

• Jo Burt