Attila the Bluebottle and more wild stories

Like a zoom lens tour of an evolving habitat in a nature documentary, the first chapter of this book familiarises us with the ecology of a house and garden abandoned by an elderly owner and twice rehabilitated, once by wildlife and then by a young family. The subsequent stories, which describe how the two sets of colonists get along with each other, are full of quirky humour and offbeat observations. There are romances and catastrophes, comedies and tragedies, all set within a lusciously vivid milieu of growth and decay and rebirth. A couple of lapidary little nature poems are slipped in gratis. This is good rich stuff for reading aloud or savouring alone.