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In his 2021 bestseller The Book of Trespass, Nick Hayes helped us jump the walls that keep us from the vast majority of the English countryside  —exposing the way in which centuries of enclosure laws have walled off our land and rivers. The book brought new energy to the Right to Roam movement with its central challenge; to view the British landscape not merely as a set of postcard views, but as a living site of historical struggle, exclusion and democratic potential.

Now, in The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England, Nick turns his focus from who owns the land to what that system of ownership has done to us collectively. Tracing the  connection between ecological destruction, private capital, and often-ignored colonial crimes, he sets out a vision for healing both soil and society. Refusing nostalgia, The Medicine Tree asks how we might mend an island poisoned by disavowal and division—inviting us to dismantle the boundaries, both physical and imagined, that keep us from a sense of belonging.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF TRESSPASS

'Brilliant, passionate and political . . . The Book of Trespass will make you see landscapes differently' 

Robert Macfarlane

'A remarkable and truly radical work, loaded with resonant truths' 

George Monbiot

PRAISE FOR THE MEDICINE TREE

This book elegantly weaves between a diaristic account of nine months moored on the Thames and a sprawling, granular and global history of the politics and spirituality of land. Both Nick's accounts of the past and the contemporary are shot through with righteous anger but countered by his tender, visceral descriptions of the body within nature that makes the reader ache to swim naked and walk barefoot in the dew. Every chapter, based on the months from September to May, demonstrates Haye's profound attachment to community, and are a clarion call for the vital rediscovery, or invention, of an Albion kinship of the land and the rivers.-

Leah Gordon

Dazzling in scope, effervescing with insights, richly illustrated, lyrically written and fired by a yearning to remake England anew. Hayes has delved deep into our buried radical history and forgotten folklore and unearthed a treasure trove.

Guy Shrubsole

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Few writers have reshaped British speculative fiction as quietly, or as radically, as M. John Harrison. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he has dismantled genre tropes across science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction—earning accolades from the Arthur C. Clarke Award to the Goldsmiths Prize. Hailed by writers including Olivia Laing and Robert MacFarlane as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today, his work is instantly recognisable.  Beautifully strange, subversive and written with a poet’s economy.  

Now, in his latest, Booker-longlisted novel The End of Everything, he confronts the corrosive and alien presence of capitalism in a world inexplicably unraveling. Refusing easy answers or heroic arcs, the reader is taken to  an England where the disaster at hand is too vast, complex, and banal to fully articulate. A society where adaptation is the stuff of fiction and whose inhabitants can only think to keep going as an apocalypse of sorts rumbles on. It is eerily familiar stuff - a world unmoored from truth and made hostile by the reflex to exploit.

PRAISE FOR THE END OF EVERYTHING

‘M.John Harrison is the closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard’ - The New Statesman 

The End of Everything elucidates humanity's disintegrating existence with strange clarity' - The Guardian 

'At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying' - Julia Armfield

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We hear from Holly Pester about her latest poetry collection, Cafés. Published this summer by Fitzcarraldo, it’s a series of dream-like narrative fragments, that explore the possibilities of friendship and love, the myriad ways in which capital invades our lives and a hope for connection that appears unnervingly bygone. 

Described by the publisher as both a ‘stylish, political intervention and an elegy for communal space,’ Holly’s writing is, as ever, resistant, loving, vivid and wildly funny - always running ahead of you, waiting as you turn the page only to lead you further on in.

‘Holly Pester’s café is a place to sink into the soft leather couches, eavesdrop, work and dream: a waiting room both strange and familiar, full of spillages (of coffee) and slippages (of language). A public space or a place to hide; to meet friends and strangers or to be alone; Pester’s brilliance builds this café up and invites us in to linger.’

― Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife

Music on this episode: Makaya McCraven - Standing on Shoulders 

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First up this month’s Sam speaks to Max Lury about his unsettling debut No Ghosts. After being reunited at Annie’s memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend. Harlow, discovers fragments of the dead – faces, gestures, glances – in AI generated videos;  Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. No Ghosts is a novel set in new space - the eerie, boundless simulcra of ai and the dead air of a spiritless age. Unnerving and uncannily recognisable, it is infused from the first page to the last with the terrible weight of an elusive absence.

Then Lara sits down with Ghost in the Throat author Doireann ní Ghríofha to hear all about Said The Dead - an unforgettable book - both history and ghost story - that will leave you gasping by its final page. In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs.

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On this episode Sally Hayden joins us from Beirut  to discuss her latest book This is Also A Love Story. Sally is a multi award winning journalist for her writing and photography, most recently winning journalist of the year at the Irish journalism awards in 2025. Her first book, My Fourth Time We Drowned won Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2022 and Non Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book awards and was shortlisted for the Baille Gifford Prize.

The subtitle of This is Also A Love Story is 'searching for good in a divided world.' This search took Sally from Rwanda to Syria, Ukraine to Japan both documenting the horrors of conflict and natural disaster as well as the capacity for love that remained. It is a profoundly moving work charting the persistence of compassion and humanity in the face of unimaginable horror. 

‘Bringing us hope from dark places, this remarkable book is the perfect antidote to our times.’  - Christina Lamb 

‘Original and heart-warming… By finding beauty amidst ugliness, Hayden finds a way of making our fractured world whole again.’ - Lindsey Hilsum

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/this-is-also-a-love-story-searching-for-good-in-a-divided-world-sally-hayden

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The ancient town of Weimar looms large in German history; a crucible of democracy and dictatorship and home to Goethe, Liszt, Schiller and Nietzsche. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out of a beech forest. 

Weimar shows us a town and its people on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on a wealth of new research acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer takes us from 1919 to 1939 as she tells the stories of the men and women who lived through the new republic and Hitler’s regime.  An unforgettable picture of lives and choices in extraordinary circumstances, Weimar takes us deep into the heart of the story of a town that dreamt of a better world and woke up to tyranny.

‘Katja Hoyer tracks the everyday acts of omission and concession in the face of ruthless wrong, showing how the compliant and the complacent ultimately undermine the brave.’ - Neil McGregor. 

https://www.thewavesbookshop.com/

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Happy Beltane to those that celebrate, here's an extra episode to welcome those longer days that are on the way. 

It’s an extended interview with author and broadcaster Zakia Sewell about the journeys and discoveries that make up Finding Albion, her search for another Britain. Born out of her 2020 radio 4 series (My Albion) - it is a rejection of a narrow and exclusionary vision of Englishness in favour of a unifying sense of national identity. 

Centred around the wheel of the year and a pursuit that took Zakia the length and breadth of  our island Finding Albion is as much an exploration of our shared colonial past as it is the weird and wonderful folk customs and traditions that continue to bind our communities together. 

What emerges is a (much needed) hopeful vision of our future and the offer to pursue a deeper sense of who we are.

'Hopeful and Inspiring' - Caroline Lucas

'Finding Albion offers up much-needed alternative national identities and stories for us to keep close and cherish. A timely book' - Jeremy Deller. 

Huge thanks to Huw Marc Bennett and the mighty Albert's Favourites for the use of Huw's music. 

Music used: 

Carol Haf (Summer Carol) 

Gwenith Gwyn (White Wheat) 

Taken from Huw's latest album 'Heol Las,' get your copy direct from Huw's band camp page. 

If you fancy getting a copy of the Finding Albion why not help the wonderful  Gloucester Road Books (Bristol) celebrate their fifth birthday by ordering it from their website. 

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Dreams and Lies

This month Sam talks to Makenna Goodman about her latest novel Helen of Nowhere. Published by Fitzcarraldo and described by Jo Hamya as ‘the perfect fairytale for our times’, it is the story of Man - an academic dogged by allusions of disgrace and a publicly failed marriage. He seeks to start again and live a ‘good life’ far from the city and is drawn into the wilds to view a house which seems to offer him escape.

Set over five acts, Man is first question by Realtor, the estate agent seeking to sell him his dream home and then the eponymous Helen, the house’s former resident, whose ghost dextrously possesses the narrative as all pretence of reality falls away. 

Meanwhile, Lara meets with Ben Lerner to hear all about the quite superb Transcription. The writer, father of one and narrator of Ben's new novel has travelled to Providence where he went to college, and where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety year old mentor and father of his friend, Max. But after his narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. 

What unfolds from this dreamlike, nightmarish, circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate the memories that make us who we are, and a moving exploration of the experience of being a son, of becoming a man and of trying to be a ‘good’ father. 

Our own tape disintegration on this episode was entirely unintended but beautifully serendipitous. If you enjoy the episode, share it with friends, lovers, loved ones and book clubbers.

Big love x

Helen of Nowhere is published by Fitzcarraldo

Transcription is published by Granta

Music used on this episode: 

Hermanos Gutierrez - Nuevo Mondo 

Ian Hawgood - Upwards Eyes EP

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This month Sam talks to Madeleine Dunnigan about her debut novel Jean. It is set over the long, blazing summer of 1976  at Compton Manor, an isolated boarding school on the south downs. An oubliette, attended by a ragged assortment of boys who have all run out of road elsewhere. Jean is there too, searching desperately for himself among a violent mix of prejudice, antisemitism and predatory intentions. With no reliable actors in his life and cast away in the wilderness of the pre-internet era, he must navigate abandonment and his own irrepressible desire. 

Meanwhile Lara speaks to John Grindrod  about his fantastic new work of social history, Tales of the Surburbia. Throughout LGBTQ+ history, suburbia has been seen as somewhere to escape from. A place where hetrosexuality rules, where difference will not be tolerated and one where you’ll never find a soulmate. But for many, those streets of twitching curtains and pebble-dashed semis were - or still are - a place to call home. Tales of the Suburbs explores the untold 20th century tale of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people in suburbia. Through remarkable archive material and original interviews.

Jean is published by Daunt Books 

Tales of the Suburbs is published by Faber

Music Used on this episode

Small Town Boy - Jose Gonzalez (Sommerville, Bronski, Steinbachek)

There is a Light That Never Goes Out - Cyrus Nabipoor (Marr, Morrissey)

Hand On your Heart - Jose Gonzalez (Stock Aitken Waterman)

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This month Canongate publish Nation of Strangers, the third ‘instalment’ in a series by Turkish novelist, essayist and journalist Ece Temelkuran. Following on from How To Lose A Country and Together it is, once more, rooted in Ece’s forced displacement from her homeland.

Recorded last December at Canongate’s offices Sam met Ece to discuss this deeply personal and unflinching account of being ‘unhomed’. Nation of Strangers is centred on a loss that will resonate deeply with anyone who struggles - in the face of rising global authoritarianism - to recognise the country they call home. Written as a set of letters to a stranger it embraces humility and love as a rejection of the politics of cynicism and asks us once we recognise what is happening, (fascism) what choice do we have but to act?

'Her most ambitious an dazzling book yet.'

BRIAN ENO

'Ece Temelkuran is a brilliant thinker, and her work here is as conceptually illuminating as it is beautifully written .... both a call and a comfort, a book that made me feel so much less alone.'

OMAR EL AKKAD

Meanwhile, Lara meets up with James Meek to hear about his latest novel ‘Your Life Without Me’; a tale of loss, provocation and the radical discomfort of the new. Centred around a single act of destruction (the attempted demolition of St Paul’s Cathedral) it is a book which asks how much of the past we can hold on to if we are to build a future worth living in. And whether change is inherently and unavoidably destructive.

Praise for the novels of James Meek 

'A story so original and so fully imagined.'

HILARY MANTEL 

'The language is so fresh and crisp and sparkling.'

PHILIP PULLMAN

Music used in this episode:
Norfik - Realization
Ida Urd & Ingrid Høyland- Duvet
Ian Hawgood - I Don’t Think We Belong Here
Norfik - Denial

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