Still water - John Lewis-stempel

The Times and Irish Independent: BEST NATURE BOOKS OF THE YEAR Great nature writing needs to be informative, detailed, accurate, lyrical, and, above all, to instil a sense of gratitude and wonder.

John Lewis-Stempel succeeds in all these things triumphantly.

From amorous toads to the eye-popping mating habits of water boatmen, a magical celebration of pond life by one of our finest, most evocative nature writers.

' Daily Mail Ponds: small bodies of water, both naturally formed and artificial, home to wondrous, multitudinous life-forms.

Ponds define our childhood: frogspawn, goldfish, feeding the ducks, but also our village life, our farms, our landscape.

And they are multi-layered - from carp circling the bottom to water boatmen, coot, and birds dragonflies overhead.

In Still Water, John immerses himself in the murky depths, both literarily and figuratively, to explore the still waters of the British countryside through each month of the year.