> Skip to content
  • Published: 15 September 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099531821
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $29.99

Nature Cure




'Britain's greatest living nature writer' (The Times) describes how he conquered clinical depression through his re-awakened love of nature.


'Britain's greatest living nature writer' The Times

Rediscover the extraodinary power of nature and the British wilderness, from award-winning naturalist and author Richard Mabey

In the last year of the old millennium, Richard Mabey, Britain's foremost nature writer, fell into a severe depression. The natural world – which since childhood had been a source of joy and inspiration for him – became meaningless.

Then, cared for by friends, he moved to East Anglia and he started to write again. Having left the cosseting woods of the Chiltern hills for the open flatlands of Norfolk, Richard Mabey found exhilaration in discovering a whole new landscape and gained fresh insights into our place in nature.

Structured as intricately as a novel, a joy to read, truthful, exquisite and questing, Nature Cure is a book of hope, not just for individuals, but for our species.

'A brilliant, candid and heartfelt memoir...how he broke free of depression, reshaped his life and reconnected with the wild becomes nothing short of a manifesto for living...Mabey's particular vision, informed by a lifetime's reading and observation, is ultimately optimistic' Sunday Times

  • Published: 15 September 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099531821
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Richard Mabey

Richard Mabey is the acclaimed author of some thirty books including Gilbert White, which won the Whitbread Biography Award in 1986, Flora Britannica(1995), winner of a National Book Award, and Nature Cure (2005), which was short-listed for three major literary awards, the Whitbread, Ondaatje, and J.R. Ackerley prizes. He writes for the GuardianNew Statesman and Granta, and contributes frequently to BBC radio. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Also by Richard Mabey

See all

Praise for Nature Cure

A book of which only he could have written a single page...marvellously observed, deeply felt from sentence to sentence. The writing is exquisite

David Sexton,, Evening Standard

A brilliant, candid and heartfelt memoir...The account of how he broke free of depression, reshaped his life and reconnected with the wild becomes nothing short of a manifesto for living...Mabey's particular vision, informed by a lifetime's reading and observation, is ultimately optimistic. It is also what makes his voice so appealing amid all the froth and flam of the eco-debate

Philip Marsden, Sunday Times

Mabey is a radical, inheritor of an old English tradition...The core of the book is his exploration of his new landscape. It feels a privilege to share it, watching him unpick the layers of watery Norfolk, with dazzling skill and the warmest of hearts, as his troubled mind heals

Michael McCarthy, Independent

Written in the radiant, tingle-making prose that has earned Mabey literary prizes and a multitude of fans... both a wake-up call and an example of how the love of nature can electrify and heal the imagination.

Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

Nature Cure moves between the nervous breakdown of an individual and the madness of the modern world with a prescience akin to that of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Jonathan Bate, Guardian

An inspiring book

Nicholas Bagnall, Sunday Telegraph

Britain's greatest living nature writer

The Times

Subtle, devotional, poetic

Observer

Rich, invigorating and deeply restorative

Irish Times