The Cow Book: A Story of Life on a Family Farm - Hardcover

'John Connell's superb memoir [...] is an unexpected triumph... Connell guides us on a fascinating history of the cow itself... It's a satisfying, powerful mix. One of the joys of this book is the prose, its clean plainness offset by the glorious cadences of Irish speech, which are also those of the Bible and the prayer book... [The Cow Book] is surely a prize-winner' -- Daily Mail

'John Connell's The Cow Book starts well... and gets better. This is an important slice of living, breathing agricultural history written with absolute honesty by an insider who has the rare quality of being able to see it from the outside too' -- Rosamund Young

'This is a brooding, powerful memoir about a 29-year-old man's return to the family farm in Ireland and his difficult relationship with his taciturn and short-tempered father... The strength and originality of this book clearly lies in Connell's searingly honest account of rebuilding his life' -- Guardian

'Connell's vivid writing brings his subject matter to life... There is much to praise here, from the way the author writes about the animals in his care, to his openness about depression and intelligent reflections on the state of modern farming. A natural writer, Connell is also a sympathetic and wise observer of the eternal struggle involving humans and animals' -- Sunday Times

'A book which pauses regularly to savour life's tiny nows... [Connell's] simple, spare style... An honest, vivid reckoning of what it's like to simultaneously belong and not belong, The Cow Book becomes John Connell's meditation on the real meaning of home and place' --

'Admirably raw and unsentimental... Threaded through the short, punchy chapters is a cultural history of the cow, from its wild origins through to the domestication to mad cow disease and artificial, lab-grown beef... This makes for an original and thought-provoking book' --Mail on Sunday

'This book is a vivid and sharply observed account of a way of life which is almost invisible, a new hidden Ireland. It is also a fascinating portrait of a single sensibility, a born noticer, someone on whom nothing is lost, observing birth and death, the landscape and his own heritage' -- Colm Tóibín

'I usually view rural Ireland from a train or car window but reading this gripping, fascinating book I felt I was becoming a cattle farmer' -- Roddy Doyle

'A gorgeous read, full of warmth, truth and tentative wonder. John Connell has written 'an elegy to the nature I know', but this book is an elegy to so much more -- to art and myth and sorrow and longing' -- --Sara Baume

Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. Until, one winter, he finds himself back on the farm and begins to learn the ways of the farmer and the way of the cows. Connell records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day - cleaning the outhouses, milking the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. But alongside the routine events, there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong: when a calf fails to thrive, when a sheep goes missing, when illness breaks out, when depression takes hold, when an argument erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid. The Cow Book is the story of a calving season. It is also the story of the cow itself, from its domestication and worship as a God by the Ancient Egyptians to the modern practice of mechanized herds, via the figure of the cowboy, the destruction of the American buffalo, the demise of the aboriginal jackaroos and the consequences of BSE. And, above all, it is the story of Connell's life as a farmer, of his relationship with his birthplace of County Longford, with the community around the family farm, with the animals he tends, and with his father.