The English Channel is the busiest waterway in the world. Ferries steam back and forth, trains thunder through the tunnel. The narrow sea has been crucial to our development and prosperity. It helps define our notion of Englishness, as an island people, a nation of seafarers. It is also our nearest, dearest playground where people have sought sun, sin and bracing breezes. Tom Fort takes us on a fascinating, discursive journey from east to west, to find out what this stretch of water means to us and what is so special about the English seaside, that edge between land and seawater. He dips his toe into Sandgate's waters, takes the air in Hastings and Bexhill, chews whelks in Brighton, builds a sandcastle in Sandbanks, sunbathes in sunny Sidmouth, catches prawns off the slipway at Salcombe and hunts a shark off Looe. Stories of smugglers and shipwreck robbers, of beachcombers and samphire gatherers, gold diggers and fossil hunters abound.

'A nostalgic experience, informative, humorous, charming, but pervaded by the bitter-sweet scent of regret' Daily Mail 'Fort has an eye for the quirky, the absurd, the pompous and a style that, like the road, is always on the move' Sunday Telegraph 'A lovely book...At last someone has celebrated the romance of the British road' Guardian The A303 is more than a road. It is a story. One of the essential routes of English motoring and the road of choice to the West Country for thousands of holidaymakers, the A303 recalls a time when the journey was an adventure and not simply about getting there. In this fully revised and updated edition, Tom Fort gives voice to the stories this road has to tell, from the bluestones of Stonehenge, Roman roads and drovers paths to turnpike tollhouses, mad vicars, wicked Earls and solstice seekers, the history, geography and culture of this road tells a story of an English way of life.

'An entertaining book, written with Fort's characteristic conversational style... A real pleasure to read' - BBC Countryfile 'A wide-ranging, intelligent and bracingly enjoyable book' - The Literary Review 'Meticulously researched and seasoned with wry humour, this is a perceptive and richly rewarding read' - Mail on Sunday We have lived in villages a long time. The village was the first model for communal living. Towns came much later, then cities. Later still came suburbs, neighbourhoods, townships, communes, kibbutzes. But the village has endured. Across England, modernity creeps up to the boundaries of many, breaking the connection the village has with the land. With others, they can be as quiet as the graveyard as their housing is bought up by city 'weekenders', or commuters. The ideal chocolate box image many holidaying to our Sceptred Isle have in their minds eye may be true in some cases, but across the country the heartbeat of the real English village is still beating strongly - if you can find it. To this mission our intrepid historian and travel writer Tom Fort willingly gets on his trusty bicycle and covers the length and breadth of England to discover the essence of village life. His journeys will travel over six thousand years of communal existence for the peoples that eventually became the English. Littered between the historical analysis, are personal memories from Tom of the village life he remembers and enjoys today in rural Oxfordshire.

A Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year Peer into the secret, silent world of the freshwater fish and explore evolution of the art and industry of fishing in Britain's rivers and streams. From cunning Neolithic traps, intricate Roman nets and quarrellous Victorian societies to the evolution of angling and eventual gentrification of river access, this history spans thousands of years and ends with a poignant call to protect the underwater world from the horrors of industrial fishing and farming. Meanwhile, another thread of the narrative weaves in the lives of the fishes themselves: the incredible struggles of the Atlantic salmon and secretive eel; the pike, a lean and camouflaged predator; the carp, huge and stately, begetter of obsessions; the exquisite spotted brown trout and its silver cousin, the grayling. Lives built on and around fishing have largely faded from Britain, but fishermen and conservationists are working tirelessly to prevent the same fate befalling the fishes.

The English Channel is the busiest waterway in the world. Ferries steam back and forth, trains thunder through the tunnel. The narrow sea has been crucial to our development and prosperity. It helps define our notion of Englishness, as an island people, a nation of seafarers. It is also our nearest, dearest playground where people have sought sun, sin and bracing breezes. Tom Fort takes us on a fascinating, discursive journey from east to west, to find out what this stretch of water means to us and what is so special about the English seaside, that edge between land and seawater. He dips his toe into Sandgate's waters, takes the air in Hastings and Bexhill, chews whelks in Brighton, builds a sandcastle in Sandbanks, sunbathes in sunny Sidmouth, catches prawns off the slipway at Salcombe and hunts a shark off Looe. Stories of smugglers and shipwreck robbers, of beachcombers and samphire gatherers, gold diggers and fossil hunters abound.

Beginning life in the Sargasso Sea, the eel travels across the ocean, lives for twenty or so years, and then is driven by some instinct back across the ocean to spawn and die. And the next generation starts the story again. No one knows why the eels return, or how the orphaned elvers learn their way back. One man discovered, after many adventures, the breeding ground of all eels ? and he is the hero of this book.

Eels were being caught and consumed 5000 years before the birth of Christ ? Aristotle and Pliny wrote about them; Romans regarded them as a peerless delicacy; Egyptians accorded them semi-sacred status; English kings died of overeating them. There are many strange practices among eel fishers all over the world, and many great fortunes based upon the eel harvest.

The Book of Eels, a combination of social comment, biography and natural history, is also a fascinating and witty account of Tom Fort?s obsession with the eel, his journeying to discover the eel in all its habitats, and the people he meets in his pursuit.

Tom Fort made his name as a writer with his bestselling travel narrative The A303: Highway to the Sun. He now focuses on matters closer to home by celebrating a quintessential cornerstone of any village in Britain - the shop - in this case a century-old hardware shop daughter-in-law bought eighteen months before the pandemic struck the UK to run herself in their beautiful Berkshire village, outside of Reading. The family's dream of developing the shop into one that would become the centre of village life certainly did come true, but for a very different set of circumstances. Rivets, Trivets and Galvanised Buckets interweaves the evolution of the shop, its previous owners, and the history of the items it sells, to its customers to present a delightful study of community and the eccentricities of ordinary people. The nationwide lockdown focused minds on the home and its immediate surroundings, i.e. the garden. People were forced to look differently at where they lived, and found ways to value that, and enhance it. They learned or relearned the pleasure and fulfilment of deploying practical skills. And they came to Tom's family shop to buy and to talk about what all this meant to them. Married to this personal story will be Tom's history of home ownership and how it nourished pride in the home and the desire to make the home better and more beautiful, and how technological progress in the mass production of tools and materials made it easy to realise - or attempt to realise - those ambitions. Rivets, Trivets and Galvanised Buckets offers fascinating history of technological progress: who thought of screwdrivers, where the spirit level came from, who devised the process of galvanisation, what genius worked out that a suction pad on the end of a piece of wood could unblock sinks and so forth. As Tom recounts: 'A little girl came with her father into Heath and Watkins, looked around for a while and said to him "Daddy, this is the shop of EVERYTHING". This is the story of how this happened.