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Cold Blood
  • Published: 15 May 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099581390
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Cold Blood

Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians

Formats & editions
EBook
8 May 2014
Paperback
15 May 2015
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Can we know what it feels like to be a toad? Or a lizard? Join Richard Kerridge on the hunt for Britain’s reptiles and amphibians and realise the potential of puddles and ditches everywhere

As a boy, Richard Kerridge loved to encounter wild creatures and catch them for his back-garden zoo. In a country without many large animals, newts caught his attention first of all, as the nearest he could get to the African wildlife he watched on television. There were Smooth Newts, mottled like the fighter planes in the comics he read, and the longed-for Great Crested Newt, with its huge golden eye.

The gardens of Richard and his reptile-crazed friends filled up with old bath tubs containing lizards, toads, Marsh Frogs, newts, Grass Snakes and, once, an Adder. Besides capturing them, he wanted to understand them. What might it be like to be cold blooded, to sleep through the winter, to shed your skin and taste wafting chemicals on your tongue? Richard has continued to ask these questions during a lifetime of fascinated study.

Part natural-history guide to these animals, part passionate nature writing, and part personal story, Cold Blood is an original and perceptive memoir about our relationship with nature. Through close observation, it shows how even the suburbs can seem wild when we get close to these thrilling, weird and uncanny animals.
  • Published: 15 May 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099581390
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Richard Kerridge

Richard Kerridge leads the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. His essays have been published in Granta and Poetry Review, and he has twice won the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing.
RK

Praise for Cold Blood

Captured moments such as the golden flash of a palmate newt delight the reader as much as they did Kerridge's childhood self

Tim Dee, Observer

[A] perceptive memoir...Cold Blood is proof that an early infatuation with the natural world can lead to a lifetime of wonder

Tim Dee, Observer

After reading this book, I know that I shall never again pass a pond or through a stretch of sun-drenched heathland without looking for the creatures that haunt Kerridge's imagination

Gerard Henderson, Daily Express

Cold Blood casts an unexpected but beautiful love-light across ordinary England, and its uncaring reptiles and amphibians

Gerard Henderson, Daily Express

Perceptive and original...Kerridge writes vividly of the natural world (5 stars)

Patrick Barkham, Guardian

In prose as effortless as a snake's progress, Richard Kerridge has written a wry, wise and refreshingly understated memoir

Patrick Barkham, Guardian