One Midsummer's Day

Lyrical and startling by turn, he reveals the extraordinary in the apparently ordinary… A jewel of a book – Caroline Lucas MPNot just a glorious celebration of swifts but of their place amid the panoply of life on Earth… Cocker is one of our greatest living naturalists… He brings to this vast subject a scientist’s rigour and a poet’s expansive vision – Philip Marsden * Spectator *A beautiful, brilliant, mind-stretching and soul-flying book. Genius – Horatio Clare, author of A Single SwallowHis grandest effort yet. Told as a series of reflections that fly through his mind in the course of a single day watching swifts from his garden in Norfolk, he ranges across topics as widely as a swift ranges across the sky… Magnificent * Financial Times *Cocker is both a superb prose stylist, with a poet’s eye and ear, and a naturalist of wide erudition and imaginative reach… One Midsummer’s Day is a wonderful book – literally, a book of wonders. – John Banville * Irish Times *A rich and elegant exploration that takes us to unexpected places. With the swift as our lift, we leave the garden on an extraordinary tour that takes in the moon, amongst many other wonderful destinations – Tristan Gooley, author of How to Read a TreeMark Cocker’s ode to a remarkable species makes a powerful case for the value of awe in a time of ecological grief * New Statesman *In his mission to restore a sense of wonder to life’s small and ordinary things, Mark Cocker takes us on a soaring journey from the Cretaceous period to a summer’s day in his English garden… Lyrical, grand and full of reverence * Guardian, Book of the Day *Cocker brings both nostalgia and universal connections to the swifts’ majestic, sky-high adventures * Mail on Sunday *A stunning celebration – and commemoration – of swifts * New Statesman, Books of the Year *

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.