Books published by Little Toller Books

Winner of the 2020 Wainwright Prize, Diary of a Young Naturalist vividly explores the natural world from the perspective of an autistic teenager juggling homework, exams and friendships alongside his life as a conservationist and environmental activist.

This is the first book about the enigmatic author J A Baker, author of The Peregrine.

Pioneering book of oral history, The Pattern Under the Plough shows that even in modern societies, governed by science and technology, there are still traces of a civilisation whose beliefs were bound to the soil and whose reliance on the seasons was a matter of life or death.

Seining Along Chesil details the working lives of the people who fished along the Dorset coast at Chesil Beach, using traditional seine nets, a way of life that has almost completely died out.

In her mid-twenties, shortly before her father's death, Davina Quinlivan moved from her family home in west London to begin a transitory life in the countryside: here she felt restless and rootless, stuck between Deep England and the technicolour memories of her family's migration story. Beginning in colonial India and Burma, from the indigenous tribes from which the women in Quinlivan's family are descended, and reaching the streets of Southall and Ealing, the stories of her ancestors persisted in the tales, the language, the cooking and culture of her family. Quinlivan conjures a place between continents and worlds in a lyrical debut of migration, and homecoming, marking the arrival of an exceptional new voice.

This new book of essays from the author of Wild tracks the turning light of the day and seasons, an almanac of the turning times, reflecting on the misunderstood Goddess, Nemesis.

In this highly acclaimed memoir the writer Jeff Young takes us on a journey through the Liverpool of his youth, down the back alleys and through arcades, through arcades and oyster bars into vanished tenements.

A new special edition of the seminal, bestselling book, with a new foreword by the author and a new jacket by the artist Michael Kirkman, to celebrate the author's 80th birthday.

In March 1943 a group of Christian pacifists took possession of a vacant farm in Frating in Essex. There they established a working community. Frating Hall Farm provided a settlement and livelihood for individuals and families, and a temporary sanctuary for refugees and prisoners of war. This is the story of the community and its legacy.

Originally published in 1948, An English Farmhouse is Geoffrey Grigson's careful survey of the old English farmhouse and its associated buildings. Grigson paints a vivid picture of rural life in the preceding centuries, and creates a delicate weave of social history.

In this extraordinary travelogue Horatio Clare recreates the walk that J S Bach, then an unknown composer and organ teacher, made in the depths of winter in 1705 across Germany to Lubeck. This was the pivotal point in the young composer's life, when he began his journey to becoming the master of the Baroque.

This small book brings together some of the beautiful art that has, for centuries, gone into the creation of almanacs and calendars. Alexandra Harris' text shows us how, through time, humans have sought to divide time into portions and how traditions associated with each month have made their way into the art of calendars and almanacs.

In the 1920s Walter Murray rented a derelict, remote cottage in Sussex, without running water or electricity. Most of the windows were broken, it was dirty and dark. For the next year, he made his home there, making a living from drying and selling herbs. Copsford is his account of that year, a book that bears comparison to Thoreau's Walden

A collection of essays about geology and the ground beneath our feet first heard on BBC Radio Three, from some of our leading landscape and nature writers. Contributors include John Burnside, Alan Garner, Linda Cracknell, Sara Maitland and Esther Woolfson.

The paperback of the first Little Toller monograph. The writer Paul Evans, also known for Field Notes from the Edge and for his many country diaries for The Guardian, traces the seasons through the life-cycle of herbaceous plants.

Beyond the Fell Wall is Richard Skelton's meditition on his explorations of a particular landscape of one valley high in the Cumbrian hills, where he lived and worked for many years. Part prose-poem and part word-hoard recording the ancient names for landscape, it offers a singular and compelling view from one of our most original writers.

A pen portrait of a farming life in southern England and in western Canada.

A search for a bird on the edge of extinction.

Like the six sides of a snowflake, the book has six chapters which explore the art, literature and science of snow, as well as Marcus Sedgwick's own experiences and memories.

Provoked by the strange, enigmatic series of paintings, Afal du Brogwyr (Black Apple of Gower), made by the artist Ceri Richards, Sinclair leaves behind the familiar, 'murky elsewheres' of his life in Hackney, carrying an envelope of B&W photos and old postcards, along with fragments of memory that neither confirm nor deny whether he belongs here.

In mid to late March 1913 Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey; In Pursuit of Spring was published in 1914. One of his most important works, it stands as an elegy for a lost world. Thomas photographed much of what he saw. The prints are now published for the very first time.