Mushrooms

The biggest attraction of all is Marren’s writing: quirky, trenchantly observant, sometimes hilarious, full of engaging anecdotes and as far from the soulless impersonal tone of a fungi field guide as it is possible to get. Implausible as it may seem, here indeed is a man’s relationship with mushrooms, in fact, his extravagant love affair with them. It is the single best book on the natural world I have read this year. – Michael McCarthy * The Independent *A wonderfully eclectic book about the strange world of fungi, by one of the best nature writers in Britain today – Stephen Moss * The Guardian *

Peter Marren is a natural history writer and former government and freelance conservationist. He is a wildlife polymath whose writings extend from newspaper journalism, obituaries, book reviews and opinion pieces to humour and news summaries for the likes of Whitaker’s Almanack. His twenty books include a quarter-million-word cultural survey of invertebrates (Bugs Britannica), a bibliographic biography (The New Naturalists), a study of rarity (Britain’s Rare Flowers), art criticism (Art of the New Naturalists), urban wildlife (A Natural History of Aberdeen) and humour (Twitching through the Swamp). He has written for every issue of British Wildlife since 1990, including many articles and news pieces about fungi. He regularly leads fungus forays into the wilds of Wiltshire and Berkshire.