CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Our countryside: use it or lose it
DAVE BANGS explains the politics of his latest book, a field guide to the middle Sussex and south-east Surrey Weald
USE IT: Ardingly Ridgelands near the South Downs
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
I LISTEN, as I sit in a small, grassy Wealden glade, while the glow of the half moon increases and the day’s light fades. The nightingale’s fluting, wet-throated lyrics, slip-slap trills and arabesque warblings fill the silence, while a far-off cuckoo calls.
This magical place is at the centre of “Mayfield,” a proposed new town in the Sussex Wealden vale between London and Brighton.
On a damp December day we track a Wealden stream’s edge through thorn thickets, along high banks and there, within the gloom, we see the fresh corpse of a giant sea trout, exhausted by the labour of spawning, lodged below the water’s spate. This creature’s Sussex race, larger and later spawning than their cousins, has been returning each winter to these wooded streams since the Ice Age.
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