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Best nature books of 2020

Diary of a Young Naturalist
by Dara McAnulty (Little Toller)
A 15-year-old boy’s diary of wildlife around his home sounds unremarkable, but Dara McAnulty’s debut was the deserved winner of this year’s Wainwright prize. McAnulty writes with great beauty and restraint about bats, buzzards blackberries, and evokes the intensity of a teenager’s life with autism and paints an intimate portrait of his family, who are “as close as otters”.


The Lost Spells
by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (Hamish Hamilton)
The Lost Words
became a cultural phenomenon: grassroots campaigns purchased Macfarlane and Morris’s poetic book about everyday nature for hospices and primary schools across the land. This is its “little sister” – pocket-sized spells to be read aloud. These incantations and their illustrations are even better than their predecessor’s, conjuring every emotion we feel about nature in troubled times: joy, exhilaration, solace, pathos and sorrow.


The Consolation of Nature
by Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott, Peter Marren (Hodder)

The first of no doubt many books exploring our relationship with nature during the coronavirus crisis raises the question of why we would want to revisit that first lockdown? This supergroup of Britain’s more underrated nature writers provides an emphatic answer. Their diaries of the sunniest spring on record capture our bewilderment, but also examine the science and poetry of “ordinary” wildlife – and why we require it to stay happy and well.

Vesper Flights
by Helen Macdonald (Cape)
The long-awaited follow-up to the global bestseller H Is for Hawk is a cabinet of curiosities. Familiar subjects – a revelatory essay on nests and a superb evocation of swifts – are placed beside unexpected forays into human migration and the internet’s dark side. Unlike most British nature writers, Macdonald has a global – or even heavenly – focus, and repeatedly returns to matters of air, flight and escape.

The Book of Trespass
by Nick Hayes (Bloomsbury)
In this overdue reassertion of a radical vision of Englishness, Hayes trespasses across fields and along rivers in order to question our acceptance of the closed, class-divided countryside. Writing in the tradition of John Clare, Hayes in this vibrant, vivid book exposes our deep-rooted rule that the value of land belongs exclusively to those who own it, not the communities who so badly need it.

• Browse the best books of 2020 at the Guardian Bookshop.