From one of our greatest nature writers: how swifts act as a window into the unity of the living world.

Mark Cocker spends a single midsummer day tracing the flight of swifts - birds that connect continents, climates and species. What begins as a quiet act of observation expands into an awe-inspiring reflection on the interdependence of life on Earth.

Cocker moves from the skies above Britain to the deep ocean currents, solar energy and ecosystems that sustain all living things. This is nature writing of rare insight, beauty and vision - a hymn to the marvel of movement and connection that binds our planet together.

'A jewel of a book' Caroline Lucas

'A beautiful, brilliant, mind-stretching and soul-flying book. Genius.' Horatio Clare

Mark Cocker is an author and naturalist whose thirteen books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His book Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and won the New Angle Prize for Literature in 2009. With the photographer David Tipling he published Birds and People in 2013, a massive survey described by the Times Literary Supplement as 'a major literary event as well as an ornithological one.' Our Place: Can We Save Britain's Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? was described by the Sunday Times as 'impassioned, expert and always beautifully written ... a sobering and magnificent work.' His most recent book, A Claxton Diary, won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2019.