Latest news with #RobertMacfarlane
Scotsman
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Robert Macfarlane at Edinburgh Book Festival: 'when you put yourself in remarkable places, surprising things happen'
One of the greatest nature writer and poets of his generation ponders the life and uncertain future of the world's waterways in his new book Is A River Alive? Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Robert Macfarlane holds up his hand on the Zoom screen to show me a strip of red fabric knotted round his right wrist. It was put there by Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist, before he set off on a 100km kayak journey down the Mutehekau Shipu (or Magpie) river in Northern Quebec. She told him: 'Only time or the river will remove it'. 'It has this rather awkward knot,' he says, tugging on it to show me. 'So when you're sleeping or resting something digs into you. At the beginning I thought that was annoying, but later on I thought it was brilliant. It's a reminder, like the pebble in the shoe, it reminds me what I learned on that river.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Writing his latest book, Is A River Alive?, involved a lot of learning, about the parlous state of rivers in the UK and around the world and about the growing Rights of Nature movement which seeks to grant them legal status, a kind of personhood, so they can be better protected. But the learning he's really talking about here is experiential, the hard-to-explain ways in which his perspective shifted during the writing of this book about the natural world, about life itself. Robert Macfarlane PIC: William Waterworth It's his most personal, most passionate book, fuelled with an urgent, driving energy. He is not a neutral observer, he is writing to convince the reader. 'I remain very much involved, legally and in terms of activism, with all of the rivers, all of the people in the book. This book has continued to flow through me and through my life and shape it and I think it will do so probably for the rest of my life.' He points to his only tattoo, on his wrist next to the red fabric, the Cuneiform characters for 'river' from the epic of Gilgamesh, which forms a kind of bubbling undercurrent to Is A River Alive? The book charts three extraordinary journeys: a hike into the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, after a mining consortium which would have destroyed it was successfully challenged under Ecuadorian law; the kayak voyage down the mighty Mutehekau Shipu, where river guardians are currently fighting a vast hydro dam development; and a journey through Chennai, India, where the river Adyar is 'as close to death as any river I have seen in my life' from industrial pollution. If a river is alive, of course, it can also be killed. It's a book which 'wears the question at its heart on its sleeve'. I ask him to what extent he knew the answer before he set out. 'I think I began in a false sense of certainty,' he says, thoughtfully. 'It was only later I realised that I had begin in doubt. The question mark mattered, this wasn't a declaration. It was a multi-year, multi-continent grappling with a very complex set of questions. I was aware I was dealing with a vast and ancient philosophical conversation about what constitutes life.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It took him out his comfort zone, because the personhood of rivers challenges 'conventional western' ways of thinking. The book isn't a marshalling of arguments, it's an account of experiences, a shift which happened in the imagination, perhaps, one might say, the spirit. It finishes with an epiphany on the Mutehekau Shipu which is (even for Macfarlane) hard to put into words. One review in a science magazine described parts of it as 'fundamentally unscientific'. 'It doesn't come easily to the rationalist mind. One is wary of woo-woo. There is a tussle between philosophical traditions which twists through the book. I learned to feel my own intellectual inheritance of rationalism. I think by the time the third journey [in Quebec] began I rapidly lost any sense of embarrassment at the idea that one might relate to a river as a friend or a force or a being. The more I met people and ideas which challenged that hard shell of certainty and began to dissolve it, the more fascinating it all became.' Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here. Macfarlane has been described as 'the great nature writer and nature poet of this generation'. His bestselling first book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003, established him at the vanguard of what has been called The New Nature Writing. He followed that success with books like The Old Ways and Underland, made television programmes and created projects like Lost Words, which has produced books, music, exhibitions and education resources. He writes lyrically, poetically, and speaks much as he writes. Riverine metaphors flow through our conversation: he talks about the book's 'tributaries', the concepts which are now beginning to 'irrigate' the law. He apologises for 'meandering'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He asks me – as he likes to ask everyone – about the 'rivers which flow through your life and your memories'. I tell him I grew up between the Dee and the Don in Aberdeenshire, which immediately leads him to make a comparison to the Tigris and Euphrates ('The Mesopotamia of Scotland!'). We talk about Nan Shepherd, the North-east writer whose book The Living Mountain has been hailed posthumously as a classic of nature writing. Macfarlane was instrumental in bringing it back to the public eye. 'She and I wouldn't reach for the same forms of language, but I think we're moving towards the same conclusions. She writes about life as a quality brought into being by relation, the mountain lives in its complex totality of air and water and plant and human and weather and rock and time. I think my book argues for life always lived in relation, rather than Newtonian single units of self.' It is certainly a book written in relation to other people. I admit to Macfarlane that I imagined him to be a lone adventurer, but this book full of people, larger than life characters like mycologist Giuliana Furci, who has a sixth sense for finding rare mushrooms, ebullient land rights lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Yuvan Aves, the inspirational self-taught naturalist Macfarlane meets in Chennai. 'I think in the 2000s I would have been that lone traveller, but there has been a trajectory towards conviviality, company and community. In this book I'm alone for approximately three minutes. I love writing about people. I've always found that, when you put yourself in the way of remarkable places and remarkable people, surprising things will happen.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad How hopeful is he for rivers? In England and Wales there is no river which has a 'good' rating from the environmental agency. Scotland has some rated higher, but that brings with it a danger of complacency. On Sunday, at the Book Festival, Macfarlane will share a stage with writer Louise Welsh who is currently exploring a new legal status for the Clyde. While more people are prepared to speak out for rivers, the opponents of river rights are often powerful, wealthy and without scruples. 'I've seen river guardians and activists working in incredibly demanding and often dangerous circumstances where standing up for water rights or land rights is not a hobby, it's your life. These people are not despairing, so for me to do would be a luxury. 'I feel so hopeful because this extraordinary movement has sprung up in the UK and organised itself across communities in a way I could never have predicted in the five years I've been working on the book. It is already changing everything. It will take 20 or 25 years for that change to materialise in a revived river system in this country, but I have absolutely no doubt that it will happen.' A few days before our conversation, the local council in Southampton adopted a river rights motion along the lines the book described. A copy Is A River Alive? was waved during a speech to support the motion. Macfarlane is clearly pleased. 'It's exciting to see these ideas moving into policy-making. It's not that the book caused that, but it has been a small part of the catalytic process around that thinking. That's another reason to feel hopeful.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
The Hindu
02-08-2025
- General
- The Hindu
Is a River Alive? Unpacking the Politics of the Rights of Nature Movement
Published : Aug 02, 2025 14:11 IST - 8 MINS READ In a 2014 keynote address on writing in the anthropocene, the author Ursula K. Le Guin suggested a simple antidote to extractivist ideologies: 'One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as 'natural resources', is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk.' This theme, of finding fellowship with ecosystems, of finding how best to channel human language to express the experience of a non-human other, forms the crux of the environmental humanities and literature scholar, Cambridge University professor, and bestselling nature writer Robert Macfarlane's recent book, Is A River Alive?, which sets out to 'imagine water otherwise'. It attempts to 'daylight long-buried ways of feeling about water, both in history and in us'. The answer to the question the title poses is yes, a river is alive, in what seems a no-brainer—as Macfarlane recounts in the book's introduction—to the author's 9-year-old son, Will. Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane Penguin Hamish Hamilton Pages: 384 Price: Rs.1,699 Set in the cloud forest of Los Cedros, Ecuador; Chennai, India, home to the Adyar, Kosasthalayar, and Cooum rivers; and Nitassinan/Canada, through which the Mutehekau Shipu river (also known as the Magpie) runs, the book explores past and present manifestations of the global rights-of-nature movement, animating the land- and waterscapes through which it runs in vivid, compelling detail. The debates surrounding an ecosystem's aliveness—which, paradoxically, makes it killable—loom large over the places and people the book undertakes to represent. Also Read | India's environmental pioneers: The forgotten story At one level, Macfarlane's intention is crystal clear: 'Rivers should not burn. Lakes should not need funerals. How has it come to this?' The many rivers embodied in this book are embattled to this day, denizens of the natural world over whom communities, environmental defenders, corporations, and governments have historically tussled. Macfarlane names them as his co-authors, averring that 'this book was written with the rivers who run through its pages'. He is accompanied in his sprawling transcontinental sojourn by some key humans as well: through Los Cedros by the mycologist Giuliana Furci, the musician Cosmo Sheldrake, and the lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito; through Chennai by the naturalist-educator-writer Yuvan Aves and various other members of his Palluyir Trust; and along the Mutehekau Shipu with the 'river-people' and fellow kayakers Wayne Chambliss, Raph, Danny Peled, and Ilya Klvana. Landmark legislations To set the stage for these three far-flung encounters, Macfarlane chronicles celebrated rights-of-nature rulings such as the the passing of the Te Awa Tupua Act granting legal personhood in 2017 to the Whanganui river in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Uttarakhand court's recognition of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers as living beings later in the same year. Such landmark legislation as the enshrining of the rights of nature in the Ecuadorian constitution and the ensuing recognition of the personhood of Los Cedros cloud forest in 2021, provide precedent and inspiration for further ecological action. An intricate welter of stakeholders and interests is revealed as Macfarlane digs deeper into each of the three cases. And yet, this global story on a grand scale is anchored to a tiny chalk stream near Macfarlane's home in Cambridge, to which the book and its author repeatedly return. Is A River Alive? is a soul-stirring paean to nature, deeply felt and thought, marvellously meditative, awash with literary, historical, and metaphysical detail representing indigenous voices and schools of thought as well as more canonical presences from Europe and North America. It is penned with imagistic ingenuity and precision by a seasoned scholar-practitioner and writer of place with the ability to instantly, intimately, render the unfamiliar familiar: 'The interior of a cloud-forest is a steaming, glowing furnace of green. To be inside a cloud-forest is what I imagine walking through damp moss might be like if you had been miniaturized.' On the other hand, a dead olive ridley sea turtle on a Chennai beach is shockingly strange, simultaneously inducing grief and horror: 'Her eyes have been eaten from their sockets by the ghost crabs. This is the fifth turtle corpse we've met that day. The geometry of her shell-scales is beautiful even in death. She stares sightless from blue-white eyeholes.' The turtle serves as a stark reminder of senseless human cruelty and violence, juxtaposed with the reeking, mortally wounded rivers of Chennai and its overflowing beaches. Fusing riverine and human consciousness Also unfolding in this section is the remarkable life story of Yuvan Aves, his escape from a physically abusive stepfather, and eventual emergence as an ecological activist and educator during and after his years at Pathashaala, a J. Krishnamurti school on the outskirts of Chennai. Finding an admirer in Macfarlane, Aves' first book, Intertidal (2023), bears witness to the ravaging of Chennai's water bodies and marshlands even as it stands testament to human fortitude and the resilience of the natural world. Far from Chennai and on the road in Nitassinan/Canada next, Macfarlane describes the juggernaut that is hydroelectric power (its convoys advancing inexorably towards the Romaine river project) in contrasting strokes. 'A bird with a voice of water trills on, unseen. Vast, triple-wagoned trucks thunder eastwards, shaking earth and whipping tree branches with their back-blast.' Macfarlane counters these forces of industry by flinging the reader into a splendid, spinning, stream-of-consciousness vortex, fusing riverine and human consciousness towards the end. The book's exquisitely textured cover, designed from a linocut by the artist Stanley Donwood for both the UK and US editions (published by Penguin and W.W. Norton respectively), pays tribute to maps of the ancient Mississippi river imagined and crafted by the cartographer Harold Fisk in the 1940s: 'In them, the Mississippi comes to life: twisting like mating snakes, writhing with river ghosts.' In deep trouble Anyone reading Is A River Alive? should revisit in tandem Krupa Ge's ground-breaking 2019 book, Rivers Remember, a fiercely anguished insider account of Chennai's waterways that Macfarlane references alongside Nakkeeran's Neer Ezhuthu (also published in 2019). Ge's book, the first to fully acknowledge the trauma of the Adyar, Kosasthalayar, and Cooum, combines personal and intergenerational knowledge with painstaking political and legal explication to shine a light on the same Chennai rivers Macfarlane meets in 2025. She highlights the gruelling conditions under which sanitation workers, health workers, fishing communities, community organisers, and—astonishingly—Eelam refugees worked to alleviate suffering during the dread-inducing December 2015 'man-made flood'. Read together, the two books memorialise a unique culture of water storage and stewardship vanishing before our eyes, in which tanks, streams, ponds, rivers, and ocean were venerated throughout the Tamil region. Can rights-of-nature proponents truthfully engage with the material conditions under which humans live and work worldwide as part of the fight? Dwelling at length on whether rivers are alive is arguably a privilege. In the Global South, nature is not typically experienced at leisure through a window or contemplated in tranquillity as a painting in a frame. Macfarlane's own chaotic Chennai experience proves this point. For anyone seeking to protect the natural world in these contexts, there can be no ignoring the situation of communities whose livelihoods depend on the industries and governments that power nature's exploitation and destruction. Even as I write, Tamil Nadu is planning a 92 kilometre sealink flyover along its East Coast Road to ease traffic congestion—a heavy infrastructure and investment project with grave consequences for marine life, environmentalists assert. Will such 'progress' really benefit a choked city and its inhabitants, continually reeling from cycles of flood and drought? As recent protests against deforestation in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Manipur in the midst of heatwaves and other signs of a rapidly accelerating ecological crisis illustrate, the natural world is in deep trouble. So are humans. The plot thickens. Unconvinced by what he sees as Macfarlane's irrational animism, the writer and evolutionary biologist Rowan Hooper dubs Is A River Alive? 'anti-science' in his recent review of the book for New Scientist. Rivers simply are not living beings, in Hooper's estimate. But he does admit the need for ecological thinking that emphasises the interconnectedness of all life forms to replace 'the Cartesian justification for exploitation'. Hooper's blithe confidence in science and scientific reasoning is somewhat troubling as is his wholesale rejection of Macfarlane's premise. Implicit in Hooper's dismissal of 'spiritualism' as unscientific is the erasure of traditional/indigenous ways of knowing, and centuries-old practices of situated cognition and wisdom that Macfarlane has, to his credit, assiduously assembled and honoured throughout. Also Read | Moments in the sands of time Must science always advance at the expense of the soul? Has not this sort of either-or framing deepened divides and brought societies and cultures the world over to this current, polarised pass? 'Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe,' Le Guin concluded in the same keynote address from 2014 with which this essay began. In her view, science has the capacity to 'increase moral sensitivity' while poetry can 'move minds to the sense of fellowship that prevents careless usage and exploitation of our fellow beings'. If the twain shall ever meet, perhaps science and poetry can together keep us all alive. Akhila Ramnarayan is a writer, theatre actor, indie musician, and college educator at Krea University.
Edinburgh Reporter
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Oscar-nominated Bookshop Band head for Edinburgh
The Oscar and Ivor Novello nominated Bookshop Band will play at Edinburgh's Pianodome on Monday 14 July as part of their 18-date Magical Summer Tour. The gig will feature brand new music inspired by the writing of Robert Macfarlane plus tracks from their latest album. Based in Wigtown but originating in Bath, the duo specialise in using both contemporary and classical literature to inspire their songwriting. They were Oscar and Ivor-Novello nominated for their work with Aardman animations to create the songs for the hit musical movie Robin, Robin. Audiences will be among the first to hear Ben Please and Beth Porter's most recent songs, including one created by special request of Robert Macfarlane for the launch of his new book Is a River Alive? They will also be performing music from Emerge, Return – their 2024 album which was produced by rock legend Pete Townshend, who also played on each of the 12 tracks. July's tour got its name following praise for the band's music for the launch of Is a River Alive. Robert Macfarlane said: 'The Bookshop Band make magic; conjuring words off the page and into song, bringing books to strange, new lyric life, singing their ways into collaboration with writers' voices and visions in ways that are thrilling and original.' Penguin Books added that that 'The music was magical'. The tour takes place in art centres, book shops and other intimate venues from Glasgow to Devon. Ben said: 'We love being on the road, playing at intimate venues. For us it's the absolute essence of being musicians – the chance to share our music, and the books we love, with audiences in every part of the country.' The duo, recently featured in the New York Times, occupy a unique space, straddling the worlds of music and literature. They have just written and performed the music for the new audiobook adaptation of Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials. Meanwhile Beth has been performing as part of the Spell Songs ensemble which grew out of two other Robert Macfarlane books – The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. During this summer's tour there will be the chance to get a sneak preview of an EP they have produced inspired by the counterculture Oz magazine of the late 1960s. The EP will be fully launched after the tour in the autumn. The band has worked with many celebrated authors with best-sellers such as Kate Mosse (The Ghost Ship) asking them to write songs for their book launches. They have previously recorded 13 albums, which have been sold at gigs and online. Emerge, Return was their first wider, commercial release. Get tickets here Like this: Like Related
Wall Street Journal
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Is a River Alive?' Review: Going With the Flow
'Is a river alive?' The question is purely rhetorical for Robert Macfarlane. A nature writer whose books include 'Underland,' 'The Wild Places' and 'Mountains of the Mind,' Mr. Macfarlane knows that rivers everywhere are very much alive in dynamic and integrative ways that are common sense to every child. Alive in ways that trump our cultural expectation that life must be organic. Mr. Macfarlane asks us to say yes to the living waters, and then treat them with the respect they deserve.
Irish Examiner
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Summer catch-up: 20 of the best non-fiction books so far in 2025
1. Pure Gold: Memorable Conversations with Remarkable People by Eamon Carr Eamon Carr, lyricist and drummer with Horslips, amongst other polymathic gifts, has gathered the best celebrity interviews from his years as a journalist. The collection describes how the interviews unfolded with giants from the era like J.P Donleavy, Rudolf Nureyev, Shane MacGowan and Jack Charlton. Written with his wry, entertaining voice, and full anecdote, it's a book to be devoured. 2. Busy and Wrecked: Create Space and Energy for the People and Things That Really Matter by Dermot Whelan Comedian and mindfulness expert Dermot Whelan's follow-up to his best-selling book, Mind Full, is an exploration of modern-day busyness and how to alleviate stress. His conversational tone, weaving in his own personal life and experiences, as well as interesting research, makes for an easy, insightful read. 3. Homework: A Memoir by Geoff Dyer Geoff Dyer's memoir about growing up as an only child in a lower middle-class neighbourhood in provincial England (Cheltenham) in the 1960s (childhood) and '70s (adolescence) might not sound appealing, but in the hands of a writer so smart and so funny, with a brilliant philosophical bent, it's a book you can't put down. 4. The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting by Tim MacGabhann While in university in Dublin, Tim MacGabhann's flatmate's father killed himself at Christmas. In the silence around the news, MacGabhann asked his flatmate how the holidays had been. His flatmate laughed and said, 'Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?' Thoughts of his own suicide is something the nomadic MacGabhann tackles head on in his brilliant, whirlwind memoir about addiction. 5. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane In what could be his finest, and certainly his most personal, work to date, the great nature writer Robert Macfarlane examines the fate of our rivers, in particular three rivers in Ecuador, India and Canada, arguing rivers should be treated like humans – or else we're all doomed. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane; Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted by Lissa Evans; and Ballybunion to the River Kwai. 6. Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted by Lissa Evans Lissa Evans got a plum job as a producer working on the Father Ted sitcom series in the 1990s. The book she's written recalling her experiences is an enjoyable read, full of yarns about the capers the actors and crew got up to on set, and insight into how the magic happened. 7. Ballybunion to the River Kwai: An Irishman's Story of Survival on the Death by Fergus Kennedy Fergus Kennedy is a retired doctor. He has pieced together his father's remarkable wartime story – he was an Irish prisoner of war in Singapore and Thailand during World War II, including time spent slaving on the notorious 'death railway' through the jungles of Thailand and Burma, which featured in the Hollywood movie Bridge on the River Kwai. 8. Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams The New Zealander Sarah Wynn-Williams landed a dream job at Facebook, but it turned into a nightmare. Her exposé of the work practices at the tech giant, including insight into its founder Mark Zuckerberg, has caused a sensation. 9. Ireland's Curious Places: 100 Fascinating, Lesser-known Treasures to Discover by Michael Fewer Architect and academic Michael Fewer has written about a hundred curious places, with accompanying photos, to tell the story of Ireland – from the church that four-times married Brian Boru prayed at (Co. Clare) to Fionn mac Cumhaill's sliotar (Co. Wicklow) and Art Ó Laoghaire's grave in Kilcrea (Co. Cork). 10. When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter Graydon Carter is a flamboyant character. His memoir about his years as a magazine editor, including a long spell editing Vanity Fair (1992-2017) is a hoot, not least for details about his on-off relationship with Donald Trump. 11. Notes to John by Joan Didion There have been few better non-fiction writers than Joan Didion. The posthumous publication of notes from her years going to therapy provide a portal into her mind and her close relationships, including with her writer husband John Dunne and their troubled adopted daughter. Notes to John by Joan Didion; Mark Twain by Ron Chernow; and Original Sin: President Biden's Decline. 12. Big Mouth by Vogue Williams Everything Vogue Williams touches seems to turn to gold. Her autobiography delves into the darker moments in her journey, including her parents' marriage breakup when she was five years old, the breakdown of her first marriage with Brian McFadden and other misdemeanours. 13. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow Ron Chernow is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. His examination of America's first literary celebrity has caused considerable excitement. He doesn't hold back any punches, exploring how Twain carefully curated his image; his troubling attitude to race; and the dark final chapter of his life when he cultivated relationships with young girls, his 'pets'. 14. The Episode: A True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing by Mary Ann Kenny Shortly after her husband died suddenly, Mary Ann Kenny, an academic who lives in Dublin, descended into a hellhole of psychosis, including a belief that her young children had been harmed by medications she took. The story of how she managed to survive her illness is astonishing. 15. Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are two experienced journalists on the Washington political scene. Their exposure of Joe Biden's deteriorating health during the final years of his presidency – and bizarrely why he was allowed run for re-election – is a fascinating read. Sports Book Highlights The Big Fight : When Ali Conquered Ireland by Dave Hannigan and Big Dunc by Duncan Ferguson. 1. The Big Fight: When Ali Conquered Ireland by Dave Hannigan: Dave Hannigan's book about Muhammad Ali's fight in Dublin in 1972 has been updated and re-issued in paperback. The co-promoter Butty Sugrue's story is so outrageous it warrants its own book. Not to mention other walk-on characters like Peter O'Toole, John Huston and Bernadette Devlin. A knockout read. 2. Shattered Dreams, Sliding Doors: The Republic of Ireland's 1982 World Cup Qualifying Campaign by Paul Little: The Republic of Ireland had a daunting task to qualify for the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain. In their qualifying group, Eoin Hand's squad faced Belgium, one of eight teams to qualify for the Euro 80 finals; Michel Platini's France; and the Netherlands, beaten finalists in the two previous World Cups. Paul Little, a child at the time, tells the story of what transpired in an engaging, third-person narrative. 3. The Last Ditch: How One GAA Championship Gave a Sportswriter Back His Life by Eamonn Sweeney: Eamonn Sweeney uses the 2024 All-Ireland series in hurling and Gaelic football – which threw up the most exciting hurling final in memory – as a platform for investigating his mental health struggles and the wonder of the GAA in Irish life. 4. Big Dunc: The Upfront Autobiography by Duncan Ferguson: Everton legend Duncan Ferguson's autobiography, which is ghost-written by Henry Winter, is proving very popular with football fans. His story includes three months spent in prison for headbutting an opponent. 5. The Last Bell: Life, Death and Boxing by Donald McRae: Donald McRae is one of the great sportswriters. His book Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing from the mid-1990s is a seminal book about the sweet science. Now, after 50 years immersed in the sport, comes his final book on boxing, and what it has become, mired in doping scandals, enthralled to easy money from Saudi Arabia. Read More Summer books catch-up: 20 of the best novels so far in 2025
