In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, & their natural & human histories. Four real fields
- walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable & knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested & changing. Four fields
- the oldest & simplest & truest measure of what a man needs in life
- looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written. Dee`s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, & a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live & how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made from the wild, to look at & think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass & fields. Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain`s very best writers about nature. It is shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize.