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Sensitive, thoughtful, and poetic. Rob Cowen rakes over a scrap of land with forensic care, leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world. --Michael Palin Heartfelt, deep, beautiful, and moving. --Tristan Gooley, author of The Natural Navigator A poetic examination of humankind's relationship with nature. . . . Recommended for the dedicated nature enthusiast and those interested in environmentalism. --Library Journal Wild and unusual. An author coming into his real story, leaping over the space between animal and human as though there were no difference between us. --Observer Blending natural history with a novelistic approach, Cowen revives his connection to the evocative, mysterious power to the natural world. --Sunday Express Luminous. . . . A breath of fresh air. --Irish Times An eerie, haunting book . . . rendered with hair raising, almost hallucinogenic, lyricism. . . . Cowen moves on through the seasons of the year and the creatures of the edge land, feeling, more than observing, how the improving circumstances of animal life mirror his own climb out of darkness. --Maclean's Thanks to Rob Cowen's remarkable book Common Ground, I've learned that there's a word for my woods: edgelands. A British nature writer, Cowen celebrates not remote slices of paradise but the wild places accessible to all of us: the unregulated land at the edges of human habitation where nature has been left to its own devices. Or, as Cowen puts it, 'the inglorious fallow patches you find at the fringes of the everyday.' . . . Cowen brings reverent attention to an edgeland near his home in the north of England.--Christian Century In beautifully written and evocative prose, English nature writer Cowen explores the relationship between humans and nature, making it abundantly clear that nature is where you find it. His subject is ostensibly a single square mile of waste land on the edge of Bilton, a small town in northern England. . . . He masterfully describes this place of beauty and garbage, a place filled with wildlife and the smells and sounds of the encroaching town. But he does much more than superbly describe the transformation of the seasons over the course of a single year. In discussing the changes the land and its inhabitants have experienced over hundreds of generations, Cowen brings the lives of individuals into sharp and poignant focus. . . . He captivatingly blends science, politics, and poetry. . . . Cowen shows how to find joy and awe in the quotidian while cogitating on the world we will leave the next generation. --Publishers Weekly, starred review A Guardian readers' Top Ten Book of the Year --Guardian Strange, complicated, deeply original and ultimately satisfying. . . . Swings from realism into remarkable histories, human and animal. All our relationships with nature are fed by the imaginative as well as the scientific parts of the mind and in Common Ground, Cowen has found a new way of opening out this aspect. --Sarah Maitland Countryfile, Book of the Month Touched by genius. --John Lewis-Stempel Sunday Express, Books of the Year One of the most original books in any genre. --Melissa Harrison Times, Books of the Year A cracking book, and having finished, I now feel deprived. --Alan Bennett London Review of Books Bold and beautiful. --Robert Macfarlane New Statesman Highly poetic. . . . Common Ground is about the transformative power of this unnoticed piece of land, if one can only stand and stare for long enough. --Serena Tarling Financial Times

Strange, complicated, deeply original and ultimately satisfying. . . . Swings from realism into remarkable histories, human and animal. All our relationships with nature are fed by the imaginative as well as the scientific parts of the mind and in <i>Common Ground</i>, Cowen has found a new way of opening out this aspect. --Sarah Maitland Countryfile, Book of the Month

Author Information

"Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist and writer whom the Guardian called, ""one of the UK's most exciting nature writers."" He has written regular columns on nature and travel for the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the Telegraph, and he is the author of Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild. He lives and writes in Yorkshire in the north of England."

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