Sacred Combe - Hardcover

Barnes, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1472914023 ISBN 13: 9781472914026

Publisher: Bloomsbury Natural History, 2016

Synopsis

A special place, a place of your own, a secret garden where life is somehow more alive than it is outside. The place is wilder and yet kinder, the creatures that live here are less tame but somehow more confiding. It's both magical and holy. Call it Eden, Narnia, the secret garden: the need for such a place is part of the human condition.

I've sought it all my life, as Alice sought the locked-up garden after she had fallen down the rabbit hole. But I did better than she: I found the key, I opened the door and walked through it. I entered the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, and nothing was ever the same again.

Simon Barnes is, without question, one of our finest natural history writers. The Sacred Combe is the story of his relationship with the great imagined place, and with the real valley, where he awoke on his first night in camp to find elephants eating the roof of his hut. It is about our abiding longing for a wilder, less civilized life, and about finding, and living, it. It is about every person's relationship with the wild world. Intensely personal in places, there are flashbacks to his childhood, reflections on a book or a painting, some meetings with exceptional people, and above all the sense of being in the bush, being both at peace and frightened prey. The Sacred Combe is where we understand the species we share the planet with, and where we also begin to understand the species we happen to be.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Barnes is the multi-award-winning chief sportswriter at The Times in London. He also writes two Saturday columns on wildlife. His twenty-odd books include three novels and the best-selling How To Be a Bad Birdwatcher. His most recent book is Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed. He lives in Norfolk, United Kingdom, with his family and four horses, beside a marsh.

Review

This episodic journey into the wilds of Devonshire, Africa and memory - the edenic spaces where species fleetingly coexist - is studded with descriptive jewels. * Nature * Few articulate the joy of watching - no, the joy of simply being with - wildlife like Simon Barnes, lyrical and prosaic in the same breath ... A delightful curiosity. -- Paul Bloomfield * BBC Wildlife * Full of brief, digestible and often-personal nuggets - centred on the Luangwa Valley in Zambia - and makes for breezy, bright-eyed reading. * Wanderlust * These chapters are littered and bejewelled with eco factoids, fascinating and irreverent. * The Times Saturday Review * This episodic journey into the wilds of Devonshire, Africa and memory - the endemic spaces where species fleetingly coexist - is studded with descriptive jewels. * Nature * His attitude to the great outdoors is similarly eclectic, combining the impish humour of an enlightened Buddhist with a fierce intelligence and superb observational skills. * Mail on Sunday * The Sacred Combe is partly a hymn to his own spiritual home, partly a meditation on the qualities that go to make such places. * Daily Telegraph *

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Natural History
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1472914023
• ISBN 13: 9781472914026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240