Adult Picks - Summer 2025
Here are our adult picks for summer 2025! Have a browse through to help focus your gift buying for this season, and beyond!
This gorgeously illustrated collection of poems illuminates and reimagines the ingenious, fragile dwellings of the living creatures around us. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage was inspired to write these poems by the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, an ambitious restoration project where history and mystery coexist. The reawakened landscape with its woods, meadows and 'jungle' offers a bustling, fertile realm for all sorts of creatures to inhabit.
Armitage uses elements of riddle and folklore to animate a series of dwellings: the 'twig-and-leaf crow's-nest squat' of a squirrel's drey, a beaver lodge's 'spillikin stave church' and a hive's 'reactor core'. Distinctions between human and animal, natural and cultivated, are blurred, emphasising commonality and creating a vibrant account of 'non-stop stop-motion life'. Dwell warns of the fragility of these spaces and their dwellers, exposed to relentless and sadly familiar environmental threats.
Just as a garden provides refuge for wildlife, so do these intricate poems offer lasting homes to those who dwell within their lines. This edition is beautifully illustrated by Beth Munro.
A sweeping story of love, adventure and adversity, The Map of Bones by Kate Mosse is an epic tale of courageous women battling to survive in a hostile land. No word, no story, no grave . . .
Olifantshoek, Southern Africa, 1688. Suzanne Joubert, a Huguenot refugee from war-torn France, journeys to the Cape of Good Hope in search of her notorious cousin, Louise Reydon-Joubert, who vanished without trace half a century ago.
Franschhoek, Southern Africa, 1862. Nearly six generations later, Isabelle Joubert Lepard follows in her footsteps, determined to investigate the lives of her ancestors – and to honour their memory – only to discover that the evils of the past, though hidden, are far from buried. And that her life, too, is under threat . . .
Painstakingly researched and beautifully told, The Map of Bones is the triumphant conclusion to Kate Mosse’s number one international bestselling Joubert Family Chronicles, following the bestselling The Burning Chambers, The City of Tears and The Ghost Ship.
A Death on Location (Reverend Richard Coles)
It's spring 1990, and in Champton the whole village is aflutter as a glamorous Hollywood movie has taken over Lord de Floures' Champton House as its set location. As the actors and extras hired from the village don their farthingales, gowns and crowns for a masque set in the 1600s, a murder interrupts filming on set - and it's an ingenious one . . .
Can Daniel solve the mystery with help from his sidekick, Detective Sergeant Neil Vanloo - even when things are so sticky between them?
Sometimes you need to get lost to find your way...
Marnie is stuck. Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that often feels like it's passing her by.
Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife's departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells. When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship.
But can they survive the journey?
'The wildflower bank outside my window hums and buzzes. At midday, the summer sun spreads the perfume of roses and honeysuckle to every corner.'
'Summer is a time of changing colours and changing light. It is when the sharp acid green of spring growth deepens and darkens.
Lengthening days and stronger light bring change to our garden; it is transformed into a tapestry of colour. The wildflower bank outside my window hums and buzzes. These insects feed on pink and white campion, cornflowers, speedwell, scarlet pimpernel and poppies.
At midday the summer sun spreads the perfume of rose and honeysuckle to every corner, bees become drowsy and drunk on these scents. It is then, when the days are long, the garden becomes a place of drama and summer hums.' Summer's Hum is the second book in a stunning seasonal quartet from beloved printmaker and illustrator Angela Harding. Each title in this pocket-sized series takes readers on a journey through the seasons, reflecting Angela's observations as the nature around her transforms and evolves over the course of a year.
Taking in landscapes across the UK including views from her home studio in Rutland, to the Scottish wilderness, via the low-lying marshlands of Suffolk and the windswept hills of Yorkshire, the beautiful illustrations and evocative imagery of the prose make this the perfect book for nature lovers and art lovers everywhere. Featuring over thirty of Angela Harding's favourite prints alongside observations taken from her books A Year Unfolding, Wild Light and Still Waters & Wild Waves, each short, small book in this seasonal collection is a beautiful new way to enjoy Angela's work and celebrate nature and wildlife across the UK at all times of year. Collect all four titles: Spring Unfurled, Summer's Hum, Falling into Autumn, Winter's Song.