The Dun Cow Rib (A Very Natural Childhood)

John Lister-Kaye has spent a lifetime exploring, protecting and celebrating the landscape and its wildlife. His memoir The Dun Cow Rib is the story of a boy's awakening to the wonders of the natural world. Lister-Kaye's joyous childhood holidays—spent scrambling through hedges and ditches after birds and small beasts, keeping pigeons in the loft and tracking foxes around the edge of the garden—were the perfect apprenticeship for his two lifelong passions: exploring the wonders of nature, and writing about them. Threaded through his adventures—from moving to the Scottish Highlands to work with Gavin Maxwell, to founding the famous Aigas Field Centre—is an elegy to his remarkable mother, and a wise and affectionate celebration of Britain's natural landscape. The Dun Cow Rib joins Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and Quarry Wood, Olivia Laing’s To the River, and John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra in Canongate’s remarkable nature writing list.