Cricket is a summer game, intended to be played on green fields under blue skies and warm sun. But, for the first time, a book explores the mesmerising beauty of cricket grounds in winter, carpeted with snow, through remarkable colour photographs depicting grounds from Lord's to the smallest village pitch in Lancashire, and internationally from New Zealand to the Indian Himalayas. For this aspect alone, Snow Stopped Play will be seized upon as the perfect gift for the cricket fan even by those utterly uninterested in the sport. But Snow Stopped Play is also a fascinatingly eccentric and charming disquisition, in the best tradition of cricket classics like Carr's Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary Cricketers, on the game of cricket itself, through its hitherto unexamined relationship with snow. Did John Arlott really find a snowflake on his sleeve at Lord's in June? Why did a Derbyshire batsman have to take his false teeth out after a snowfall at Buxton in 1975? And has the Sussex fast bowler and poet John Snow ever written a poem about snow?

Everyone's image of the ideal cricket ground will be a village field, fringed by trees, the outfield dappled with clovers and buttercups, swallows flitting above... And what of all the other wildlife associated with this most natural of sports? At the Oval these days, Test Match Special's commentators remark on the resident foxes as often as the traditional pigeons. At Teddington Town CC in London's Bushy Park matches are frequently interrupted by incursions of deer; at Lyndhurst in the New Forest by wild ponies. At Kirkby Lonsdale CC in Cumbria the local fungus group found 20 species of waxcap on the outfield. For some reason hoopoes, spectacular orange and black-crested birds from southern Europe, favour cricket grounds on their rare migrations to the UK. This unique, funny, delightful cricket book from left field explores the relationship between cricket grounds and the natural world, from wildlife records to the Edwardian cricket writings of Edmund Blunden, and in many remarkable photos.

Half boat, half aeroplane, taking off in a thrilling tumult of spray, the flying boat was the journey of a lifetime, Imperial Airways' legendary Empire boats flying up the Nile in nightly hops and alighting on lakes and in harbours all the way down to South Africa. But in 1939 the Empire boat Corsair came down in fog on a tiny river in the Belgian Congo and, through an epic salvage operation, gave its name to a new village in an obscure backwater of Central Africa. The Flying Boat That Fell to Earth, re-published with a new Afterword, tells the story of this amazing adventure, and seeks out, from Alaska to the Bahamas, the very last places on earth where it was still possible to catch a flying boat.