Join Joe Shute as he travels across Britain tracing the history of our seasons and discovering how they are changing. We talk about them. We plan our lives around them. The changing seasons are part of us all. But what happens when the weather changes beyond recognition? Joe Shute has spent years unpicking Britain’s love affair with the weather, poring over the centuries of folklore, customs and rituals our seasons have inspired. But in recent years Shute has noticed a curious thing: the British seasons are changing far faster and far more profoundly than we realise. Daffodils in December, frogspawn in November, swallows that no longer fly home, floods, wildfires and winters without snow. Nothing is behaving as it should, sending nature into an increasing state of flux. In Forecast, Shute travels all over Britain tracing the history of the seasons, and discovering the extent to which we are now growing disconnected from them. While documenting these warped rhythms caused by the changing weather, he records the parallels in his personal journey as he and his wife struggle to conceive a child. This is a book that races to keep up with the march of the seasons as they rapidly change course. It examines how the weather is reshaping the world around us, and asks what happens to centuries of culture, memory and identity when the very thing they subsist on is slipping away.

For millennia, we have tried to explain ourselves using the raven as a symbol. It occupies a unique place in British history and has left an indelible mark on our cultural landscape. The raven's hulking black shape has come to represent many things: death, all-seeing power, the underworld, and a wildness that remains deep within us. Legend has it that the fate of the nation rests upon the raven, and should the resident birds ever leave the Tower of London then the entire kingdom will fall. While so much of our wildlife is vanishing, ravens are returning to their former habitats after centuries of exile, moving back from their outposts at the very edge of the country, to the city streets from which they once scavenged the bodies of the dead. In A Shadow Above, Joe Shute follows ravens across their new hunting grounds, examining our complicated and challenging relationship with these birds. He meets people who live alongside the raven in conflict and peace, unpicks their fierce intelligence, and ponders what the raven's successful return might come to symbolise for humans in the dark times we now inhabit.