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The Nature of Seeing
  • Published: 8 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529977905
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
Categories:

The Nature of Seeing

Finding Wonder in the Living World

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What does it mean to truly see the natural world? One of our greatest nature writers encourages us to reclaim our sense of wonder and pay close attention to the living world around us.

What does it mean to truly see the natural world? The Nature of Seeing is a celebration of the art and practice of paying close attention.

Whether it is the sight of moonlight across a bedroom floor, or an owl as it hunts, or waxcap fungi that erupt across the fields overnight - Mark Cocker encourages us to reclaim our innate gift for wonder and to see the living world in all its infinite detail and mystery.

Through a series of diary entries describing his encounters with the natural world, he interrogates how we see and how it affects us at the most profound levels. In precise and lyrical prose, he shows us that seeing is a creative act that can both transform us and change the world we share.

Revelatory and profound, The Nature of Seeing is the culmination of a lifetime's love affair with the simple act of looking and all that it reveals.
  • Published: 8 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529977905
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
Categories:

About the author

Mark Cocker

Mark Cocker is an author and naturalist whose fourteen books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and won the New Angle Prize for Literature in 2009. A Claxton Diary won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2019, and his most recent book, One Midsummer’s Day, was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Award 2023.
MC

Also by Mark Cocker

One Midsummer's Day
A Claxton Diary
Our Place
Claxton
Crow Country
Birds Britannica
Birders
See all

Praise for The Nature of Seeing

One of my favourite nature writers. The Nature of Seeing will transform how you view the world around us. This fascinating book draws on years of Mark Cocker’s own illuminating observations during what he calls a "lifelong loving affair" with nature. Just one encounter with an ant in his bath inspires a meditation on the future of humankind!

Martha Kearney

Cocker knows and shows how to pay attention to the dazzling world in and around us. You’ll put down his luminous book regretting all the living you’ve missed out on by not reading it earlier, but relieved that you’ve found it before it’s too late

Charles Foster, author of The Edges of the World

There can be no better companion for anybody interested in and concerned about the living world than Mark Cocker. In The Nature of Seeing... there is simply knowledge, experience and a rare integrity

Jim Crace, author of Harvest

A treasure trove of a book, packed with jewelled descriptions and piercing insights. A wonder to keep returning to. Mark Cocker is one of Britain’s greatest writers

Ben Rawlence, author of The Treeline

A lifetime of looking informs every page of Mark Cocker’s book. Through his eyes, the natural world appears more layered, more diverse, more wonderful - a place revealed not just by knowledge and deep immersion, but by love

Philip Marsden, author of Rising Ground