Into the Secret Heart of Ashdown Forest is a love letter after a forty-year affair. Wry, funny, moving and vivid, this memoir chronicles the life of the author and the ten square miles of country he calls his Kingdom. This book is as good as a brisk walk in the woods on an autumn day. Written with love and passion, it is a hymn to landscape and freedom. It is a close and deep observation of the writer’s adopted country, the fabled Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, (the home of Winnie the Pooh), where he has lived and ridden for the past forty years. His gift is the ability to take you deep into the landscapes that make this place resonate in his heart: its streams, woods, heathlands. You meet its literary residents, A.A, Milne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. You get beneath its skin among the networks of fungi that allow the trees to speak. You taste its foods, meet its locals, both the living and the ghosts, and see its huge importance during the plague year 2020-21 through the pandemic lockdowns. His passion for horses shines through these pages and his writing is, as he himself says, a form of ‘moving meditation’. He takes you under the soil of this place and he leaves a soft glow on the landscape when he is gone.

A Fisherman in the Saddle is a meditation on joy; it is a return to those things that have given me the greatest pleasure in life – horses and fishing. Both have been lifesavers in their time, like medicine in their effect. Horse riding is cheaper than seeing a shrink and I find contemplation or meditation as a by-product of riding or fishing, life enhancing. This book was born out of the death of a horse, Sebastian. To commemorate him I started writing and soon found all my other horses appearing on the pages of this book, like milestones to my life. They carried me into beautiful landscapes on three continents and offered solace when everything else failed. When I am in the saddle I’m home, wherever I may be. And the sea has never failed to provide fish and the best kind of companionship. I have always been seawitched. If you love the outdoors and find solace under the sky, then this book is for you. And if you love horses and landscape, or the sea and fishing, then you will find a bonus here.

Seeking peace in Idaho after a brutal war, ex SEAL, Commander Ross McCallister, is asked by his former Special Ops Agency to do one last job, to derail a Democrat politician who is running for the Governorship of Idaho on an anti-nuclear waste ticket. McCallister finds that sometimes it's dangerous to do the right thing. This is a story of betrayal, heroism and redemption - an environmental adventure and a love story. This Country I Call My Own features an American officer who has served with distinction in the Middle East and then worked for various agencies in the region. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he leaves the military and settles in the mountain country of the Idaho Panhandle, just below the Canadian border, to live off-grid in search of Eden and a nature cure. He builds a horse packing and hunting operation to sustain himself, but finds the ongoing interactions with members of the public troubling to his peace of mind. He wins the love of two very unconventional women who share his love of horses and are prepared to join his fight to rid the state of toxic nuclear waste and the poisoning of the land and the water table. The seemingly pristine Panhandle turns out to be an environmental disaster area and McCallister fights for his sanity, his community and his ranch. The book explores the desire of many people to opt out of our society to live a more secluded, off-grid life in nature. And it considers the power of nature and horses to cure mental illness. It looks at the dynamics of loving relationships when there are no barriers or rules. And it unpacks what it means to be a good man.

Here is a book for everyone who loves food and travel. It is a book that will introduce you to the foods of Africa, Europe and the USA with great company along the way. This is not a gourmand’s book of overindulgence, but a slow savouring of the food that has nourished the author’s imagination and taste over a lifetime. The son of a baker, Julian Roup grew up in South Africa with two powerful food cultures, his mother’s French-Dutch-Norwegian heritage and his father’s Eastern European Jewish food tradition. The mix provided him with sophisticated and discerning taste buds from the earliest age. His journeys around South Africa, Mozambique and Angola provide tales of adventurous travel well stocked with interesting food. Emigrating to the UK in 1980, he discovered a whole new world of tastes in Europe as he ventured into his new continent from Greece to Portugal, Spain to France and Italy, with visits to America’s West Coast as well. He is as interested in the taste of bread as he is in cordon bleu. Roup is best known for his books on the environment, horse riding, fishing and politics, but now he invites you to join him on his trail out of Africa to Europe and America, with all the colour and tastes of the places he fell in love with. This is a book that will feed your appetite to break bread and to take to the road once more in search of the best the good earth offers us.

“Brilliant: engaged, intelligent, personal… and funny” – Financial Times Ten years after democracy arrived in South Africa here is a book that gives a voice to the Afrikaner, speaking in English about the ‘Miracle’ of the peaceful transition to majority rule – their worst nightmare. This is a book that goes beyond politics with the very human story of one man, giving insight into the hearts and minds of a people struggling to find their identity as white Africans trying to secure their place in Africa. They are seen through the eyes of a Boerejood – a half-Afrikaans, half-Jewish writer – who struggles himself with issues of identity, reflecting the struggle around him. In the final analysis Boerejood is about the universal human struggle between good and evil, black and white, justice and injustice, love and hate – all that defines us as being human. It takes the reader on an astonishing and remarkable journey of discovery, the destination being the soul of the Afrikaner, and an answer to why these people accepted black majority rule with relatively no struggle, after years of racist persecution of their black and brown neighbours. “Reading Boerejood is like being a voyeur at a hugely animated dinner party where you sit and listen to highly charged debate with intelligent people locking horns. They make fascinating points and then incredibly inane and naïve remarks. Then they dazzle with astute observations. You are hooked and hang on to every word.”- Cape Times

Into the Secret Heart of Ashdown Forest is a love letter after a forty-year affair. Wry, funny, moving and vivid, this memoir chronicles the life of the author and the ten square miles of country he calls his Kingdom. This book is as good as a brisk walk in the woods on an autumn day. Written with love and passion, it is a hymn to landscape and freedom. It is a close and deep observation of the writer's adopted country, the fabled Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, (the home of Winnie the Pooh), where he has lived and ridden for the past forty years. His gift is the ability to take you deep into the landscapes that make this place resonate in his heart: its streams, woods, heathlands. You meet its literary residents, A.A, Milne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. You get beneath its skin among the networks of fungi that allow the trees to speak. You taste its foods, meet its locals, both the living and the ghosts, and see its huge importance during the plague year 2020-21 through the pandemic lockdowns. His passion for horses shines through these pages and his writing is, as he himself says, a form of 'moving meditation'. He takes you under the soil of this place and he leaves a soft glow on the landscape when he is gone.

“With precise, stunning photographs and a distinctly literary narrative that tells the story of the forest ecosystem along the way, The Living Forest is an invitation to join in the eloquence of seeing.” —Sierra Magazine From the leaves and branches of the canopy to the roots and soil of the understory, the forest is a complex, interconnected ecosystem filled with plants, birds, mammals, insects, and fungi. Some of it is easily discovered, but many parts remain difficult or impossible for the human eye to see. Until now. The Living Forest is a visual journey that immerses you deep into the woods. The wide-ranging photography by Robert Llewellyn celebrates the small and the large, the living and the dead, and the seen and the unseen. You’ll discover close-up images of owls, hawks, and turtles; aerial photographs that show herons in flight; and time-lapse imagery that reveals the slow change of leaves. In an ideal blend of art and scholarship, the 300 awe-inspiring photographs are supported by lyrical essays from Joan Maloof detailing the science behind the wonder.