Wild Thing: Finding hope and a home in the natural world by Randal Plunkett (Eriu, £20)
The 21st Lord Dunsany, Randal Plunkett, admits to not owning any tweed or polo-necks and hates Pimms. A reluctant aristocrat, a rewilder and film-maker, he recounts the story of inheriting the title of Baron Dunsany, alongside Dunsany Castle and the 1,600-acre, estate in Co Meath. His memoir reveals the allure of nature and how a cold castle with responsibilities to earlier generations became a personal mission towards building a more environmentally sound future. The Dunsany nature reserve is now the biggest privately-owned rewilding project in Ireland or Britain and has attracted the attention of Trinity College Dublin. Part of the estate is also dedicated to sustainable plant-based agriculture. The only “aristocrat” the author now has time for is the slow-growing Irish oak tree.
[ How did a baron in Co Meath launch Ireland’s largest rewilding experiment?Opens in new window ]
Unveiling the Sun: A Mayo Journal by Seán Lysaght (Stonechat Editions, €25)
This mosaic of observations of nature is culled from notebooks Seán Lysaght has kept for 25 years. His heartland is the landscape of north Mayo, the Nephin Beg mountains and river catchments as well as moorland. Wildlife, the weather and social history come under his gimlet eye and the collection is compiled to cover one calendar year. Lysaght’s serendipitous jottings are in a writing style that the French call écriture. Dip into the pages and you are transported to a field or mountainside with a flock of meadow pipits, stonechats, wheatears or a description of the imperious sea eagle. In the best traditions of the genre, the author invokes the work of wildlife writers such as Jim Crumley, Helen Macdonald and JA Baker.
The Bookseller of Hay: the life and times of Richard Booth by James Hanning (Corsair, £22)
The entrepreneur Richard Booth transformed the obscure market town of Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh-English border into a place of bookshops paving the way for a celebrated annual literary festival. Known as the “King of Hay”, Booth opened his shop in 1962 and by 1986 visitors came to a place that boasted 40 bookshops employing 150 people. His remarkable story, related through a series of interviews, is not exactly a biography but a narrative of how an eccentric and often shambolic businessman, with innumerable contradictions and a flair for publicity, designed what became a world-renowned phenomenon. Booth, who died in 2019, was a divisive figure, creating in the author’s view a town that is “famous for being famous”, but a bibliophile whose influence remains immense.
