Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Nature on the Cover

And those two touchstones of my imagination abound here in these wonderfully stylised images of the South Coastal Path along which Raynor Winn and her husband Moth trudged after being made homeless.

I am yet to read the sequel and am looking forward to it.

Nature and poetry go hand-in-hand… and the sea on the cover of this collection looks so like the sea that lurks no more than 25 minutes’ drive from my home/

And this last collection of poems before Dunmore’s death in 2017 is heartbreaking. Perhaps just to quote the opening stanza of her final poem gives a taste

Death, hold out your arms for me
Embrace me
Give me your motherly caress,
Through all this suffering
You have not forgotten me.

Again, I love this image: the stylisation, the blockiness of the rock, the impossible projection of the cliff…

And the novel is so wonderfully heart warming – full of those found-family feels!

Oh look, it is the ocean, again, in another stylised cover! And again it is beautiful and somehow captures both the power of the ocean and the resilience of the lighthouse in the midst of it.

I was tempted to include The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex too, but I felt that something else non-fiction fitted.

Turning away from the ocean, forests are another great imaginative touchstone for me – and I love deer. I remember seeing my first deer and, having spent a lifetime imagining something fragile like Bambi, I was astounded by the sheer bulk and physicality of them!

I also love the melding of the forest and the deer, and the simplicity of the white cover.

Also, it was a great and eerie book to read!

Another strange tree-based cover… and truly I have forgotten why I picked this one up… possibly it was the cover!

But those roots – a network of roots stretching and twisting around each other and into the earth – are a gorgeous metaphor for… something I am sure!

And with Moonflower Murders – the second in Horowitz Atticus Pund mysteries which are wonderfully twisty detective stories within detective stories – we can usher in some bird life. Firstly, the owl in a wonderfully clean and precise cover.

And Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News is a much darker detective novel. Full of wit and humour and exceptionally rounded characters this is the third in the Jackson Brodie series which just gets better and better.

The more naturalistic and hook-beaked bird of prey here does feel more appropriate to this novel that the stylised owl would do!

Another bird on this cover – or perhaps just a few black brush strokes – and it is the simplicity of this cover again that I love.

And of course the bird is the central image, grown from Ted Hughes poetry into to potent and heart wrenching symbol of grief and loss. So of course the book needs nothing else on the cover.

I was toying between this novel and The Searcher by French as well but decided that this one fits the theme better. And suits the stylised nature images, and the simple stark black-on-white palette of other books here.

It is also a reminder to myself to read the book! I adored her Dublin Murder Squad series and enjoyed The Searcher… but the opening chapters of this did not engage me so much. A rather entitled little prig seemed to be the main character and I wasn’t in the right place to give him the chance to become likeable.

I loved, loved loved this book: although it was not without its flaws it was so rich and powerful in its evocations of nature and the parallels between books and trees, and the damage we as a species are causing to our natural world…

Oh, and the cover is gorgeous with those concentric circles.