To write about the North West coast is to do battle with the tenacity of stereotype. It is to dodge well-worn evocations of depressed, down-at-heel seaside towns, gaudy sea-front arcades, Ferris wheels, roller coasters and caravan parks and of past-their-best Lakeland towns with stunning views and grim prospects. To write about these places is to somehow acknowledge a variety of well publicised truths about the social and economic struggles of neglected and disenfranchised populations and also to dig deeper - to find the views and perspectives that surprise and make strange. No collection, even one including writers as varied and accomplished at the ones you'll meet in this anthology, could claim to provide a complete, exhaustive account of a region which encompasses hundreds of miles of coastline with centuries of complex history, a myriad of urban and natural habitats, and the entire available spectrum of human experience. Under these grey skies and rain-spotted sands lurk teeming hidden myriad of secret wildlife. Yet the stories included in Seaside Special succeed in gifting us readers with `postcards from the edge.' These ten writers, some of them established and some being published here for the first time, answer the challenge to `surprise and make strange' in an array of startling, often discomforting and most of all vivid glimpses of some of the lives and landscapes contained in this stretch of coast.

'Like Robert Macfarlane re-written by Cormac McCarthy.' Telegraph 'Beckett doing Beowulf.' London Review of Books One thousand years from now, the sole inhabitants of a small island - a group no larger than an extended family - are living in a post-civilised world. They are perhaps the Earth's only human survivors. But lurking outside their isolated community is a figure in red, an emissary from another way of life: a virtual place of refuge and security, of escape from the dangers of a newly wild world. The visitor calls it Alexandria. A work of radical and matchless imagination, Paul Kingsnorth's new novel is a mythical, polyphonic drama driven by elemental themes: of community versus the self, the mind versus the body, machine over man; whether to put your faith in the present or the future. Set on the far side of the climate apocalypse, Alexandria completes the Buckmaster Trilogy, which began with Kingsnorth's prize-winning The Wake.

Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist, an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on 'sustainability' rather than the defence of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change. Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth's thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls 'dark ecology,' which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. Provocative and urgent, iconoclastic and fearless, this ultimately hopeful book poses hard questions about how we have lived and should live.

What kind of man am I? I wonder what I think about that now that I have spent a year here, watching the layers peel off, stripping myself back . . . Beast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man living alone on a west-country moor. What he has left behind we don't quite know; what he faces is a battle with himself, the elements and with the animal he begins to see in the margins of his vision. A creature that will become an obsession . . .

After moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expects to find contentment. It is the goal he has sought ― to nest, to find home ― after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he finds that his tools as a writer are failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself.

Informed by his experiences with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world ― or are they part of the great lie which is killing it?

Part personal journey, part manifesto, "Real England" offers a snapshot of a country at a precarious moment in its history, while there is still time to save its future. British citizens see the signs every day: the chain cafes and mobile phone outlets that dominate high streets; the disappearance of knobbly carrots from supermarket shelves; and the headlines about yet another traditional industry going to the wall. For the first time, here is a book that makes the connection between these isolated, incremental, local changes and the bigger picture of a nation whose identity is being eroded. As he travels around the country meeting farmers, fishermen, and the inhabitants of Chinatown, Paul Kingsnorth will refract the kind of conversations that are taking place in country pubs and corner shops across the land--while reminding readers that these quintessentially English institutions may soon cease to exist.