PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Joe Shute is an author, journalist and weather watcher with a passion for the natural world. He is a senior staff feature writer at The Daily Telegraph where he writes the weekend ‘Weather Watch’ and ‘What to Spot’ columns. Joe studied history at Leeds University and started his career as a trainee reporter on the Halifax Evening Courier before working at The Yorkshire Post as its crime correspondent. He previously wrote A Shadow Above: The Fall and Rise of the Raven, published by Bloomsbury in 2018. He lives with his wife in Sheffield. @JoeShute / www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/joe-shute/
In his urgent, elegiac new book, Joe Shute travels Britain chronicling the extent to which this unpredictable new 'weatherscape' is not only blurring distinctions between spring, summer, autumn and winter, it's also causing havoc in both the natural and manmade world ... Its call to mend our broken relationship with the land feels more vital by the day. * Mail on Sunday * Forecast is the most urgently needed, most important book I have read in a very long time. Here we have, graphically explained and charted for us, the indisputable evidence of the rapid decline and ruination of our natural world, our responsibility for it, and its consequences for ourselves and for every creature on our planet. I cried often as I read it. The plants cannot tell the tale, nor the insects, nor the birds, nor the refugees streaming north in their millions. Joe Shute has done the fieldwork, and is a writer of great power. Forecast is personal, the author profoundly knowledgeable. Follow his words, follow the facts, follow the science. It may not be too late. It must not be. I think Joe Shute is the Gilbert White of our time. * Michael Morpurgo * With a journalist's eye for detail, he backs up his captivating anecdotal evidence regarding the seasons with the results of solid scientific research to finger the culprit: global warming. * Countryfile * At its core, this book is a love letter to the biosphere and to our bond with it. Joe Shute has a journalist's ear and a lover's eye; he demonstrates what one sees while moving across the land, tracking change when all else seemed still. This is no ordinary nature diary - it enlarges our perspective of what has altered, and what is being lost ... this is one of the most poignant and affecting nature books I have read this year. * Miriam Darlington * An absolutely beautiful account of life going on while the world stopped. I loved it. * Kate Bradbury * Joe Shute does not rant but, with passion and expertise, illuminates in beautifully clear prose, laced with well-judged literary and historical references, the scale of the threat posed to our natural world by Climate Change. A 'must read' for anyone who is curious and who cares * Jonathan Dimbleby * Joe Shute is one of Britain's finest writers on nature. Or indeed, any other subject. * John Lewis-Stempel * What a wonderful read. Joe has interwoven our national pastime, our obsession about the weather, into a fascinating history of our changing climate through the centuries and it's defining influence on our consciousness. Told through the eyes of farmers, poets and philosophers as well as the author's own personal explorations across the country, Forecast is a beautifully written elegy to our natural world and a warning of how quickly it is changing. * William Sieghart *
