Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2021. Swifts live in perpetual summer. They inhabit the earth like nothing else on the planet. They watched the continents shuffle to their present positions and the mammals evolve. They are not ours, though we like to claim them. They defer all our categories and present no passports as they surf the world's winds. They sleep in the air, their wings controlled by an alert half-brain. Yet for all their adaptability and longevity swifts have recently been added to the Red List of endangered birds. The Screaming Sky is a radical new look at the common swift, a numerous but profoundly uncommon bird, by Charles Foster, author of the New York Times bestseller Being a Beast. Foster follows swifts lyrically, manically yet scientifically. The poetry of swifts lies in their facts and this book, the paperback of the Wainwright shortlisted monograph, draws deeply on the latest extraordinary discoveries.

'A soaring gift of a book' Owen Sheers 'Remarkable' Mark Vanhoenacker, author of Skyfaring 'Stunning . . . a love letter to nature' Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love The day she flew in a glider for the first time, Rebecca Loncraine fell in love. Months of gruelling treatment for breast cancer meant she had lost touch with the world around her, but in that engineless plane, soaring 3,000 feet over the landscape of her childhood, with only the rising thermals to take her higher and the birds to lead the way, she felt ready to face life again. And so Rebecca flew, travelling from her home in the Black Mountains of Wales to New Zealand's Southern Alps and the Nepalese Himalayas as she chased her new-found passion: her need to soar with the birds, to push herself to the boundary of her own fear. Taking in the history of unpowered flight, and with extraordinary descriptions of flying in some of the world's most dangerous and dramatic locations, Skybound is a nature memoir with a unique perspective; it is about the land we know and the sky we know so little of, it is about memory and self-discovery. Rebecca became ill again just as she was finishing Skybound, and she died in September 2016. Though her death is tragic, it does not change what Skybound is: a book full of hope. Deeply moving, thrilling and euphoric, Skybound is for anyone who has ever looked up and longed to take flight. Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award 2018.

Piet Maritz was vir jare lank 'n karakoelpelskoper in die ou Suidwes. Gedurende sy vele omswerwinge het hy baie interessante mense ontmoet en dinge ondervind. In Kruis en dwars deur ou Suidwes deel hy van hierdie herinneringe en laat jou lag, huil en verlang na vervloe dae.