Books of the Month: From Shy by Max Porter to Michael Frayn’s memoir

Martin Chilton reviews the biggest new books for April in our monthly column

(The Independent)

Spring awakens the flowers – and stirs the publishing industry’s arrival of more “green” books. Among the highlights of April’s fresh offerings is Keggie Carew’s Beastly: A New History of Animals and Us (Canongate), which is a positive, information-packed read about reconnecting with our wild world.

Wild is a word that came to mind reading Catrina Davies’s Once Upon A Raven’s Nest: A Life on Exmoor in an Epoch of Change (Riverrun), which is based on the recollections of a working-class Devon farmer called Thomas Hedley. It is a beguiling, earthy tale of a lost world, one rarely examined in print. Hedley’s outlandish yarns about brawling and risk-taking mix with stories that reveal his complex relationship with nature.

The farmer wasn’t a man for half-measures, though. In 1976, when a noisy owl in an ash tree was keeping him awake, he recalls: “That night I wait until the owl starts squeaking then I go out with my chainsaw and cut the tree down.” I’m not sure his brutal anecdote would fit into Tree Stories: How Trees Plant our World and Connect Our Lives by Stefano Mancuso (Profile Books, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti), which is full of rather more captivating stories of how trees are rooted in human history.