This blog’s Book of 2025 – Mark Avery

I have reviewed 50 books on this blog this year – a wide-ranging varied selection including many high quality works. If you are looking for a Christmas present for a nature-loving naturalist then this list might give you some ideas and I’ve whittled it down to a shortlist of eight books that most impressed me before plumping for the best, just in my opinion, of them all. Here is the full list in alphabetical order by author, with links to my reviews:

1. Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds by Barbara Allen – review
2. Pine Marten by Dan Bagur – review
3. The Borders. The Lands we Share by Andrew Bibby – review 
4. Nature Needs You by Hannah Bourne-Taylor – review 
5. Water of Life by Tom Bowser – review
6. No Island too Far by Michael Brooke – review 
7. The Marsh Tit and the Willow Tit by Richard Broughton – review
8. Wild Galloway by Ian Carter – review
9. Ghosts of the Farm by Nicola Chester – review
10. The Book of Bogs by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw – review
11. Donald Watson edited by Roger Crofts – properly reviewed by Ian Carter – click here – and with a few words from me – click here.
12. A Wilding Year by Hannah Dale – review
13. The Highland Cow and the Horse of the Woods by Roy Dennis – review
14. Urban Plants by Trevor Dines – review
15. Bugwatching by Eric R. Eaton – review
16. Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith – review
17. The Secret Life of a Cemetery by Benoit Gallot – review 
18. Clouds by Edward Graham – review
19. Endemic by James Harding-Morris – review
20. Neurodivergent, by Nature by Joe Harkness – review
21. The Farming for Nature Handbook by E.E. Hart et al – review
22. Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion – review
23. Lifelines by Julian Hoffman – review 
24. The Physics of Birds and Birding by Michael Hurben – review
25. On Land and Water by Sheena Jolley and D. J. O’Sullivan – review
26. Beastly Britain by Karen R. Jones  – review
27. Just Earth by Tony Juniper – review
28. Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone by Robert B. Keitle – review
29. Wildly Different by Sarah Lonsdale – review
30. The Game of Life by Julian Simon Lopez-villalta – review
31. Rare Plants by Peter Marren – review
32. The Birdman of Auschwitz by Nicholas Milton – review
33. A Brush with Fungi by David Mitchell – review
34. The Restless Coast by Roger Morgan-Grenville – review
35. Forgotten Forests by Jonathan Mullard – review
36. Words from the Hedge by Richard Negus – review
37. Life Changing by David North – review
38. Beepedia by Laurence Packer – review
39. The Birds of Bedfordshire by Tony Plozajski – review
40. Love, Anger and Betrayal by Jonathan Porritt – review
41. Fenland Nature by Duncan Poyser and Simon Stirrup –  review
42. The Merlin by Frank Rennie – review
43. Scientists on Survival by Scientists for XR – review
44. The Cuckoo Calls the Year by Peter Stroh – review
45. Exmoor by Flemming Ulf-Hansen – review
46. Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth – review
47. Land Beneath the Waves by Nic Wilson – review
48. Spiders and Harvestmen of Yorkshire by Richard I. Wilson – review
49. The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester – review
50. Seascape by Matthew Yeomans – review

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Shortlist for my Book of the Year 2025

I have picked my book of the year, but I’ll reveal that right at the end of this post.

Is it even sensible to pick books of the year? If you have been waiting for books which update the status of spiders in Yorkshire or birds in Bedfordshire then the books that deal with those topics may be, far and away, your books of 2025 as those published this year are both very good. 

I haven’t read every ‘nature’ book going. There are a lot of them about.

I read and review books that I am sent and a few that I buy. If I haven’t reviewed your book this year then that is usually because your publisher didn’t send it to me (even though, perhaps, you asked them to do so).

I’ve reviewed books published by smaller publishers as well as many from the big outfits. There are plenty of very fine books published by smaller firms and some poor books published by the larger ones. I’ve also reviewed a few books published outside the UK.

At this time of year I look back on the books I’ve read and try to judge them by their impacts on me – was I interested, challenged, informed? Very clearly, that makes these choices personal ones because what I find interesting you may not, and what I find challenging may seem commonplace to you.

Here, though, are my top eight books of the year (still in alphabetical order by author) so my Book of 2025 is one of these;

1. Ghosts of the Farm by Nicola Chester – review  (A journey back in time to the farmland of a patch of southern England 80+ years ago)
2. The Highland Cow and the Bird of the Woods by Roy Dennis – review (How more grazing by cows will help Capercaillie numbers recover and be good for other pinewood species)
3. Urban Plants by Trevor Dines – review (You are surrounded by plants, some native, some non-native, making a wild living in our streets, building sites and car parks if you just open your eyes)
4. Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith – review (A sceptical look at the arguments both for and against the ‘right’ to roam.)
5. Just Earth by Tony Juniper – review (Would a fairer society help with environmental sustainability? Almost certainly.)
6. The Restless Coast by Roger Morgan-Grenville – review (A coastal journey around the UK by a thoughtful man who asks the right questions about what he sees.)
7. Life Changing by David North – review (A celebration of the changing year on the North Norfolk coast with the best collection of art of any book reviewed by me this year)
8. Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth – review (Tracing the path of a wandering Wolf through several European countries – about the wolf, but also about the countries and their people)

If you are wondering ‘Why eight in the short list?’ then you should have a philosophical tussle with yourself about what would be a better number. However, the actual reason is that it was easier to pick a top eight than a top 10.

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Covers?

I’ve rated all of the reviewed books’ covers as well. Although you can’t judge a book wholly by its cover (or its title) you can expect to see something that tells you about the book that lies between the covers. I’m looking for a cover that is attractive (or if not, then striking) and which informs (it would be odd for a cover to be full of birds if the pages are not) and which in some way captures the tone and mood of the writing. That isn’t easy to do – and it must be easier for some books than others.

Authors rarely have a great deal of say over the covers of their books so here we are looking at the decisions of the publisher.

The default score that I have given covers this year is 8/10 which sends, I hope, the signal that most book covers are attractive and do the job of giving an impression of the contents fairly well.

My bugbear with book covers is when they approach being advertising hoardings with somewhat meaningless few-word recommendations from people of whom we are supposed to have heard. The place for recommendations, preferably several-word ones which might be intelligible, is the back cover. Many a fine cover is wrecked by these quotes.

Here are three examples of covers, from books outside of those short-listed for this blog’s book of the year, which scored 9/10, 9/10 and 5/10 respectively.

The Cuckoo Calls the Year:

I gave this cover 9/10. I think it’s simply lovely and I am a great fan of Carry Akroyd with three of her works on the walls of my house. The artist lives near the setting for this book, as do I, and she captures the Nene Valley (on a good spring day) very well. And isn’t it enticing? Don’t you want to be there – and won’t that make you pick up the book and then you’ll be hooked. It is art, uncluttered by extraneous words – just the essential title and author’s name. I’m not sure why I didn’t give it 10/10!

Words from the Hedge:

I like this cover because of its simplicity and mixture of accuracy and artistic licence. I gave it 9/10. I also feel a bit sorry for the author because he chose to publish with Unbound, ‘Publishing for the 21st century’, ‘…a crowdfunding publisher’ which has bombed (so, not so much of the 21st century, after all).  Publishing a book (and this is a good book with a good cover) has enough stressful moments but you hope that they are surpassed or at least balanced by short periods of elation.

Endemic:

This is a good book with only an adequate cover.  I gave this cover a mark of 5/10. Bloomsbury could do, and usually do, better. It’s OK, but it wouldn’t make me pick up this book in a bookshop as it looks a bit amateurish (to me). And that’s a shame as the book is a very interesting read.

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Previous Books of the Year on this blog

This year’s chosen Book of the Year joins these past selections;

2024    The Flitting by Ben Masters – review

2023    Traffication by Paul Donald – review

and      Cry of the Wild by Charles Foster – review

2022    In Search of One Last Song by Patrick Galbraith – review

2021    The Implausible Rewilding of the Pyrenees by Steve Cracknell – review

2020    Red Sixty Seven curated by Kit Jewitt – review  

and      Cottongrass Summer by Roy Dennis – review

2019    Green and Prosperous Land by Dieter Helm – review

2018    Wilding by Isabella Tree – review

2017     Sky Dancer by Gill Lewis – review

2016    Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham – review

2015    The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks – review

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And so, which is my Book of the Year for 2025?

It is:

Urban Plants by Trevor Dines (Bloomsbury).

This book changed the way I thought about plants, and pavements and time spent in built up areas. I immediately started looking down a lot more on the morning after I got my copy.  Trevor Dines is an expert on plants but a wonderfully skilled communicator – through writing, media interviews, talks to audiences and a chat with an individual. I’ve known some impressive communicators but I’d put him in the top rank. And the book is beautifully designed and is packed with attractive and informative images of plants, maps and graphs. On top of that the writing is wonderful and slips easily between anecdotes which make good points  and explanations of complex issues.

Buy it as a present for some people you love over Christmas and they will thank you for it.

And, by the way, the cover by Carry Akroyd is gorgeous too.

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If you’ve only just noticed that I write book reviews, around one a week through the year (but not every week and sometimes there are several on a Sunday) and want to keep in touch with them, then an easy way to do so is to subscribe to my free monthly newsletter which will zoom into your inbox on 21st of each month with links to conservation news and views as well as links to the past month’s book reviews by me – sign up here.

And lastly, my own book (co-authored with Colin Rees), Wings Across the Atlantic, is available from the independent online bookstore Lulu – click here – (but if I were you, I’d get Urban Plants first!).

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