Our Place

Essential reading for anybody who cares about the future. -- Henry Marsh * New Statesman **Books of the year** * A seriously great book, important and urgent As soon as I finished Our Place, I packaged up my copy and sent it off to Michael Gove this is the kind of book that demands action. -- Alex Preston * Guardian * Best known as one of our foremost nature writers, Mark Cocker spent several years researching this tour de force stuffed with eye-opening statistics by turns hopeful, melancholy and humorous [Our Place] is heartfelt. -- Ben Hoare * BBC Wildlife **Book of the Month** * Thunderingly necessary Cocker on this kind of form eloquent, practical, dogged and wise is the sort of dynamic chivvying force [conservation] will always need the book hes written however measured, equable and intelligent is a call for revolution. -- Richard Smyth * New Statesman * Impassioned, expert and always beautifully written Our Place is a sobering and magnificent work. -- Christopher Hart * Sunday Times * It is easy to be angry about environmental destruction; easy to demand change without hope but in this potent, elegant and influencing telling of the story of what we have done to England's wildlife, Mark Cocker archives something more: a reasoned tone in a radical cause. If you care about our country, read it. -- Julian Glover * Evening Standard **Books of the Year** * What a relief it is to have this subject explored without the usual diatribes and righteous hysteria. Cockers quiet tone carries great authority and [Our Place] deserves to command respect and wide attention. -- Tom Fort * Literary Review * A fierce polemic by an eminent ornithologist about Britains denuded natural habitat. * Sunday Times **Must Reads** * Fascinating Our Place is a brave book... It will undoubtedly ruffle what few figurative feathers we have left. -- Katharine Norbury * Caught by the River * A new book by Mark Cocker is a major event, and [Our Place] is no exception Cocker has always been brilliant at considering our relationship with nature You can come away from it feeling that something can be done, that we can save Britains wildlife, if only there is the will to turn well-meaning generalities into action. The clock is ticking. -- Matt Merritt and John Miles * Bird Watching *

Mark Cocker is an author and naturalist whose thirteen books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His book Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and won the New Angle Prize for Literature in 2009. With the photographer David Tipling he published Birds and People in 2013, a massive survey described by the Times Literary Supplement as 'a major literary event as well as an ornithological one.' Our Place: Can We Save Britain's Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? was described by the Sunday Times as 'impassioned, expert and always beautifully written ... a sobering and magnificent work.' His most recent book, A Claxton Diary, won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2019.