'A subtle, moving celebration of place and connectedness . . . The Grassling brings the sounds, smells and sights of the countryside alive like few other books. Burnett stretches the limits of prose, infusing it with poetic intensity to create a powerful, original voice' PD Smith, Guardian What fills my lungs is wider than breath could be. It is a place and a language torn, matted and melded; flowered and chiming with bones. That breath is that place and until I get there I will not really be breathing. Spurred on by her father's declining health and inspired by the history he once wrote of his small Devon village, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett delves through layers of memory, language and natural history to tell a powerful story of how the land shapes us and speaks to us. The Grassling is a book about roots: what it means to belong when the soil beneath our feet is constantly shifting, when the people and places that nurtured us are slipping away.

Surveying a wide range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir by women writers, this book explores our most pressing environmental concerns and shows how these texts find innovative new ways to respond to our environmental crisis. Arguing for the centrality of individual encounter and fragmentary form in 21st-century literature, as well as themes of attention, care, and loss, Baker highlights the ways that fragmentary texts can be seen as a mode of resistance. These texts provide new ways to consider the role of individual agency and enmeshment in a more-than-human world. The author proposes a new model of 'gleaning' to encompass ideas of collection, assemblage, and relinquishment and draws on theoretical perspectives such as ecofeminism, new materialism and posthumanism. Examining works by writers including Sara Baume, Ali Smith, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Bhanu Kapil and Kathleen Jamie, Baker provides important new insights into understanding our planetary predicament.

Haunting, lyrical, unforgettable, Girl in the Dark is a brave new memoir of a life without light. Anna Lyndsey was young and ambitious and worked hard; she had just bought an apartment; she was falling in love. Then what started as a mild intolerance to certain kinds of artificial light developed into a severe sensitivity to all light. Now, at the worst times, Anna is forced to spend months on end in a blacked-out room, where she loses herself in audiobooks and elaborate word games in an attempt to ward off despair. During periods of relative remission, she can venture out cautiously at dawn and dusk into a world that, from the perspective of her cloistered existence, is filled with remarkable beauty. And through it all there is Pete, her love and her rock, without whom her loneliness seems boundless. One day Anna had an ordinary life, and then the unthinkable happened. But even impossible lives, she learns, endure. Girl in the Dark is a tale of an unimaginable fate that becomes a transcendent love story. It brings us to an extraordinary place from which we emerge to see the light and the world anew.

This first full-length study of modern British nature writing is timely and invaluable for literary scholarship in the environmental crisis.

Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music. "Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance." Rebecca Tamás

Plunge into mountain lakes and drift along meandering rivers in Swims, the debut poetry collection by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett. A long poem taking many forms, Swims begins and ends in Devon, moving across the waterways of England and Wales: from urban pond to open sea. The poet swims among fishermen on Grasmere, reimagines the body as bottle cap in the Channel, and clambers down the bank of the river Ouse with words scrawled on her swimsuit. As political as they are personal, these meditations are conceived as environmental acts that probe the relationship between landscape, memory and the self. A sinuous, innovative debut, Swims reminds us of the power of swimming to transform the human spirit, registering what the water gives to us and what it takes away.

The perfect Christmas gift for the bookworm in your life. 'Beautiful and moving... It will kickstart a cascade of nostalgia for countless people' Marian Keyes When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up different worlds and cast new light on this one. She was whisked away to Narnia - and Kirrin Island - and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library. In Bookworm, Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life and disinters a few forgotten treasures poignantly, wittily using them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm. 'Passionate, witty, informed, and gloriously opinionated' Jacqueline Wilson 'A deliciously nostalgic treat' Good Housekeeping 'Lucy Mangan has enough comic energy to power the National Grid' The Spectator