Jacky Harvey

This is a book is about walking and writing; about walkers who wrote, and writers who walk. And because it is a book about walking and writing it is also a book about thinking, the circuit that exists between mind and feet, and about moving through a landscape that can be both physically in front of you, and exist in a line of words or the flight of a line of thought. And since all this walking and writing and thinking must have somewhere to take place, it is also a book about Suffolk, where I come from as a writer. So it also has a something in it of the journal, the writer's notebook; a little of the memoir and a little of the love-letter. You might call it the literary biography of a landscape. You may follow the walks on foot, with this book in your backpack perhaps, for those moments when walking must give way to reading, or you can follow them from within the deep comfort of a favourite armchair. You will travel in it from west to east, from chalk plain to crag; from velvety farmlands muffled by leaves to deafening shingle and uncompromising sea. You will be in excellent company - the walkers who will join you along the way range from Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson to Patricia Highsmith, Maggie Hemingway, Rebecca Solnit and Noreen Masud. They will include the poets George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Algernon Swinburne, Stevie Smith and Blake Morrison; the literary greats Wilkie Collins, George Orwell and W. G. Sebald, who found a new native land here; and those born to it, such as M. R. James and Edward Fitzgerald. All have their own thoughts, their own connections and reflections to add to the conversation. Let us walk.

When wounded, grieving war-hero Jack Fiskardo arrives in the London of 1639 from the battlefields of Europe, a veteran not just of conflict but of tragedy, his only wish is to make a life for himself and his two sons different to any he has known. But in an England on the verge of civil war, and a city full of bitter rivalries and deadly secrets, a soldier''s past cannot be so easily forgotten. As the country pulls itself apart there are battles to be fought of the heart and mind as much as on the battlefield, and with the reappearance of his first and deadliest foe, Jack is vulnerable in ways he never was before. Escaping who he was may be impossible - but saving those he loves will mean risking everything he has.

The earliest evidence of a human and a pet can be traced as far back as 26,000 BC in France where a boy and his 'canid' took a walk through a cave. Their foot and paw prints were preserved together on the muddy cave floor, and smoke from the torch the boy carried was left on the walls, allowing archaeologists to carbon-date their journey. And so, the story unfolds, from these prehistoric days all the way up to the present, of humans' innate and undeniable need to live in the close company of animals. In this startling new work, acclaimed cultural detective and life-long pet owner Jacky Colliss Harvey uses her compelling story-telling skills and keen eye for historical investigation to examine our role as animals' companions, in this exploration of the history not of the pet, but of us as pet-owners. Drawing on literary, artistic and archaeological evidence of our relationships with other species, over thousands of years of human experience, she examines the when, the how and the why of our connection to those animals we take into our lives, assessing these against the latest scientific thinking on this complex and enthralling subject, and suggesting new insights into this most long-standing of all human love-affairs.