Nature and conservation writing's biggest UK prize has revealed its 2026 shortlists, with 43 books across six categories vying for honours at a September ceremony at Kent's Elmley Nature Reserve.

When in any doubt or perhaps when facing too much choice, it’s a safe bet to reach for an old faithful, so I did just that when I picked this Grisham from the TBR pile by the bed. For the uninitiated, TBR means To Be Read or should that be BTBR – Begging To Be Read.

Dicks There was little on which we did not draw a dick, compassing grey paint off lockers, etching desks, but mostly inking each other’s files or textbooks, apostles casting cocks across the Sea of Galilee, Tybalt shaking terrible showers onto poor Juliet, dark colossi swung over relief maps of Gallipoli, some veiny and ridged, some rushed as signatures.

A change is as good as a rest they say and this novella is certainly a change. If you need waking up, this is the book for you, with its short chapters and fast pace. Despite the narrator’s protestations, it is not an advice manual, not a manual of good advice, at least.

The Old Pantry Sun angles for a perch of glass, Cups alight on their scroll hooks. Life transfers to bone china Her sparkling buds and lustres. Oilcloth glistens to cut scraps of light, A dimmed or glittering stillness, But from the dark, the recessed silence, White food floats dim surfaces.

Since its birth in a stairwell in Connecticut, it’s been quite a ride! Stairwell Books founders Rose Drew and Alan Gillott reflect on how it all began… ‘It was 1994 and I was a single mum living in a house in Connecticut, about 45 minutes from New York City,’ remembers Rose Drew, the editorial half of the team.

Few writers are able to nail the retrospective surreality of a place and time in history with the elegant efficiency of Bill Broady. Set against the backdrop of a seedy, institutionally misogynistic and terminally necrotic Leeds of the 1970s, the unnamed narrator of There’s No ‘F’ In Wonderful is a knowing flâneur, a recorder of the sociocultural zeitgeist.

They’re back, The Thursday Murder Club! The residents of Cooper’s Chase Retirement Village. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim are on the trail of the baddies once more and, as ever, are aided by Chris and Donna and of course, Bogdan, among others. The familiarity is comforting, like a cup of cocoa on a winter’s day. It’s a new puzzle but you know you’re surrounded by helpful friends.

When I Land in Northern Ireland When I land in Northern Ireland I long for cigarettes, for the blue plume of smoke hitting the lung with a thud and, God, the quickening blood as the stream administers the nicotine. Stratus shadows darkening the crops when coming in to land, coming in to land.

To read Bill Manhire’s poetry is to be lulled, with an ironic lack of effort, into a landscape that is loaded with sense and meaning for the poet’s narrator(s), but perceived as gently out-of-kilter by the charmed observer.

I have often wondered where ‘The Book Club’ originated. It seems (I think) to be a predominantly female affair. From what I’ve heard, some groups are very serious and engage in rigorous debates about ‘this week’s choice’; some are more gossip-fests where the wine flows freely and local scandal is shared.

Simon Armitage’s ‘The Moon and the Zoo’ explores the enduring connection between wildlife and people in honour of conservation charity’s anniversary British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has written a major new poem celebrating wildlife - and the responsibility we all have to protect it - to mark the 200th anniversary of international conservation charity ZSL.

In Passing How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom: as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious Lisel Mueller’s poem of natural evanescence is rendered with a delicacy that befits a barely perceptible transitioning of forms.

A cosy crime, this novel is set on a suitably isolated, fictitious Welsh island which is inhabited by a close-knit population who look out for each other and don’t seek publicity.

Liam Hughes’ wonderful new take on the medical profession as viewed from the assured, if not patrician, perspective of an informed backward glance corroborates at least one long-held suspicion: that its staff, because permanently beleaguered, are amongst the most sardonic of humourists.

She has worked alongside British intelligence, been befriended — and duped — by a real spy, and watched her government blow up buildings in the Welsh countryside. Now, with her latest thriller, The Hiding Season, Ava Glass is bringing the shadowy world of espionage to Yorkshire.

Dance of the Stream Sprite Shuffle through the shady shallows, Leap from log to log, Tango past the tangled brambles, Tiptoe round the bog. Skipping, stepping, pirouetting where the minnows teem; I’m dancing to the mesmerizing music of the stream. Balance over broken branches, Limbo under bridges, Twist and turn through murky tunnels, Samba with the midges.

Obviously, the title of this novel would attract any self-respecting teacher (or student) of English Literature even though the blurb makes it quite clear that Shakespeare’s Scottish play has nothing to do with it – or has it?

A Winter Night It was a chilly winter's night; And frost was glittering on the ground, And evening stars were twinkling bright; And from the gloomy plain around Came no sound, But where, within the wood-girt tow'r, The churchbell slowly struck the hour; As if that all of human birth Had risen to the final day, And soaring from the worn-out earth Were called in hurry and dismay, Far away…

The Only English Kid When the debate got going on ‘Englishness’, I’d pity the only English kid – poor Johnny in his spotless Reeboks and blue Fred Perry.

Ends At my end of the earth the Atlantic began. On good days trawlers were flecks far out, at night the green waves were luminous. Gulls were the birds that gobbled my crusts and the air in my bedroom was salty. For two weeks once a whale decayed on the pale beach while no one swam. It was gelignite that cleared the air. The uses of village carpenters were many.

Some places have our hearts for all sorts of reasons; the sea has mine even though I no longer live near to it and I have never even been able to swim. We’re an island after all and, Northumberland to Cornwall, the coastal views are magnificent.

‘That’s the thing about murder. It’s all fun and games until it happens to you.’ The blurb attracted me to this novel, given that it said it was set in Ludlow, a very pretty market town in Shropshire where I lived for a few years. An unusual and somewhat rural setting for a murder, I thought, until I saw the heading of the first chapter: Ludlow, Kansas. Ah!

Stories of the treatment of Allied prisoners-of-war by their Japanese captors in the Eastern theatres of the second world war would have fallen on deaf ears at my secondary school in the late sixties. Blindsided to the suffering of others by a tendency to self-obsession, there was little scope for empathy in the annals of preoccupied juvenilia.