The natural world is under siege. Its inhabitants are living truncated lives; starving, constricted, diseased, and neurotic, they cannot be the sorts of creatures they are meant to be. We are used - indeed over-used - to learning about this siege from the perspective of concerned humans. Photos of seals drowned in nets and oiled gulls no longer excite our imagination, and so they excite neither empathy nor resolve. The only way to reignite these imaginations is by way of story.

This is a book of stories, told through the eyes of eight animals - one of whom is human - set in modern Britain under the greatest siege of our time: human nature itself.