Rain: Four Walks in English Weather [Idioma Inglés] - Softcover

Rain is that rare and delightful thing, nature writing that entertains as it informs. (Tristan Gooley, author of The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs)

Wonderful. (James Rebanks, author of A Shepherd's Life)

Rain is a beautiful little book. Melissa Harrison offers us the simple pleasure of being outside, and the less obvious pleasure of being outside in the rain. In her company, informed both by a deep knowledge of the natural world and an abiding love for it, that pleasure becomes revelatory. (Philip Marsden, author of Rising Ground)

Melissa Harrison . . . is a refreshingly measured companion with a quick eye for the details which make rain a pleasure . . . This conversational book embraces a diversity of observation and natural history. (Horatio Clare Daily Telegraph)

Harrison is the perfect walking companion: informed, inquisitive and insightful with a way of conjuring the natural world on the page that, at times, verges on magical. (Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground)

Acutely observed and lucidly written, this book restores rain to its proper place in the national affections. (Jean Sprackland, author of Strand)

Rain has never been so interesting . . . or so beautifully described. (Countryfile Magazine)

[Harrison's] writing, lucid, precise and tending towards restraint rather than the overly adjectival prose of some nature writers, gives a tangible sense of how the landscape comes to life with the first raindrops. (New Statesman)

Harrison renders the familiar strange by visiting the British countryside in the rain . . . She describes plants, flowers, insects and birds she encounters on each walk in poetic and vivid detail, interweaving her descriptions with childhood memories and extracts from literary and historical sources. (James Attlee Independent)

How exhilarating to find that Melissa Harrison, a nature writer as well as a novelist . . . has both the specialist knowledge and knack of language to explain why water falling from the sky is such a pleasurable part of daily existence . . . Harrison marshals the many dialect words that describe rain into a wonderful appendix, which allows the reader to savour both their individual and cumulative richness. (Kathryn Hughes Guardian)

Melissa Harrison writes a monthly Nature Notebook column in The Times. Her debut novel Clay (2013) won the Portsmouth First Fiction Award and was chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year. Her second, At Hawthorn Time, was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award. It was one of A. S. Byatt's Summer Reads in the Observer, and a Book of the Year for 2015 in the Telegraph. She lives in south London.