How to Catch a Mole
And Find Yourself in Nature
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize 2019
A calming, life-affirming book about the British countryside, the cycle of nature, solitude and contentment, by a brilliant new nature writer who spent time homeless as a young man, sleeping in the hedgerows he now knows so well.
Although common, moles are mysterious: their habits are inscrutable, they are anatomically bizarre, and they live completely alone. Marc Hamer has come closer to them than most, both through his long working life out in the Welsh countryside, and his experiences of rural homelessness as a boy.
Over the years, Marc has learned a great deal about these small, velvet creatures who live in the dark beneath us, and the myths that surround them, and his work has also led him to a wise and uplifting acceptance of the inevitable changes that we all face. In this beautiful and meditative book, Marc tells his story and explores what moles, and a life in nature, can tell us about our own humanity and our search for contentment.
How to Catch a Mole is a gem of nature writing, beautifully illustrated by Joe McLaren, which celebrates living peacefully and finding wonder in the world around us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This informative and effortlessly readable work from poet Hamer is at once an educational primer on the titular species, and a sensitive look at his own life in the unlikely profession of molecatching. Long employed by homeowners and farmers in Llandaff, Wales, to help them eradicate animals generally regarded as pests, Hamer explains that he stopped after becoming "tired of hunting, trapping and killing." However, he also shares a sense of gratitude for "a life that encourages a passion for nature, for its functional beauty and its violent brutal energy even for its decay." His writing conveys this passion with closely observed descriptions, such as of how moles dig tunnels, helped by their "dark, blue-black hair... soft and velvety brushes just as easily backwards, forwards and sideways." Hamer also peppers the narrative with personal history, referencing experiences with homelessness, when like a mole he "perfected hiding skills and went underground," surviving outdoors and avoiding contact with other people. Ultimately a reflection on humanity's fraught but sustaining relationship with nature and on life's "intertwining rhythmic cycles that thump along," Hamer's heartfelt work should have far wider appeal than its niche subject might suggest. With b/w illustrations.
