If you love books, you'll love Portable Magic

For many of us, books are the life we chose without thinking about it too much. Emma Smith's terrifically knowledgeable and thoughtful Portable Magic helps us understand every aspect of what our beloved books stand for. I for one am very grateful. What a delight this book is.

Irresistibly fascinating

Brilliant... amusing, darkly sobering, and consistently fascinating ... a combination of deep scholarship and down-to-earth wit

Fun, playful, learned and accessible... Smith is herself a magical writer

Smith's genius is to question as well as to value and register every contradiction - to make you, the reader, think without even suspecting that you are ... for communicating complex material in conversational, occasionally irreverent, prose

Joyous ... thrilling ... A brilliantly written account of the book-as-material-object, and the slightly seedy pleasures of "bookhood"

Wildly entertaining ... This fascinating, slyly amusing book carries an undertow of personal affection for the curious, rectangular, multileaved objects with which we're so familiar

Smith's enchanting book sparkles with gems of trivia that often conceal deeper truths about the evolution of reading and publishing. Fascinating, enlightening, funny and touching, this is indeed portable magic

Emma Smith's history of the physical book is a thing to cherish ... witty and ingenious ... Smith reads with all her senses alert ... A wise, funny, endearingly personal book

Anyone who's ever enjoyed the feel or indeed smell of a book should read Emma Smith's delightful and informative Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

From bullet-stopping Bibles to tomes bound in human skin, Smith's history of books revels in their magic and malignity. It skewers our faith in the written word yet repays it handsomely

An eloquent and personal insight into the terrible human as well as environmental cost of cheap food and an inspiring account of the people working to heal our relationship with our habitat and ourselves. Urgent, necessary and moving.

A fine book: heartfelt, honest and hopeful. Sarah has the knowledge and skill to help people better understand where their food comes from and why we should all care.

Moving, intimate, tender and searing, this is a gem of a book with deep roots and fresh green shoots.

A timely and optimistic book, ostensibly about why we need farming to produce food, but more deeply about how farming is done, or could be done. Refreshingly authentic, Rooted gives us a hopeful sense of a regenerative future

Evocative and resonant. These are stories that need to be told.

Poetically written and filled with compelling data about modern-day farming

Where Rooted ploughs its own shining furrow in its humanity ... but also the gathered, inspirational stories of farmers trying to do better and greener.

[Silent Earth] should be obligatory reading for politicians and those in power... compelling... [Goulson] draws up his case in a very readable and accessible style... an essential and timely book.

After another frame-wrecking year I can think of no better book to recommend than Dave Goulson's Silent Earth

Goulson's book deserves to be widely read. It is fact-filled and well balanced in the minefield of environmental politics.

Challenging, but also funny and refreshingly low in sanctimony, this book is no frothing polemic. It will doubtless alter many readers' understanding of the systems we all participate in and lead them to make different choices. For others, it should prompt the difficult moral reasoning that those of us who love animals but also profit from their suffering cravenly manage to avoid... Mance is an amiable guide: curious and open-minded.

Mance...is spot on to make us confront the horrible truth... [How to Love Animals] will force its readers to stop and think about the incomprehensible scale of unnecessary suffering we impose on our fellow creatures.