Forecast

Author Joe Shute
Narrator Matt Addis
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 8 hours and 24 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Climate change, Conservation of the environment, Conservation of wildlife and habitats, The Earth: natural history: general interest, The environment, Travel and holiday, Travel writing, Weather and climate: general interest.

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What to expect

Join Joe Shute as he travels across Britain tracing the history of our seasons and discovering how they are changing.

We talk about them. We plan our lives around them. The changing seasons are part of us all. But what happens when the weather changes beyond recognition?

Joe Shute has spent years unpicking Britain’s love affair with the weather, poring over the centuries of folklore, customs and rituals our seasons have inspired.

But in recent years Shute has noticed a curious thing: the British seasons are changing far faster and far more profoundly than we realise. Daffodils in December, frogspawn in November, swallows that no longer fly home, floods, wildfires and winters without snow. Nothing is behaving as it should, sending nature into an increasing state of flux.

In Forecast, Shute travels all over Britain tracing the history of the seasons, and discovering the extent to which we are now growing disconnected from them. While documenting these warped rhythms caused by the changing weather, he records the parallels in his personal journey as he and his wife struggle to conceive a child.

This is a book that races to keep up with the march of the seasons as they rapidly change course. It examines how the weather is reshaping the world around us, and asks what happens to centuries of culture, memory and identity when the very thing they subsist on is slipping away.

Critics Review

Forecast is the most urgently needed, most important book I have read in a very long time.
Michael Morpurgo
This urgent, elegiac book’s call to mend our broken relationship with the land feels more vital by the day.
Mail on Sunday
With a journalist’s eye for detail, he backs up his captivating anecdotal evidence regarding the seasons with the results of solid scientific research to finger the culprit: global warming.
Countryfile
At its core, this book is a love letter to the biosphere and to our bond with it. Joe Shute has a journalist’s ear and a lover’s eye; he demonstrates what one sees while moving across the land, tracking change when all else seemed still. This is no ordinary nature diary – it enlarges our perspective of what has altered, and what is being lost … this is one of the most poignant and affecting nature books I have read this year.
Miriam Darlington
An absolutely beautiful account of life going on while the world stopped. I loved it.
Kate Bradbury
Joe Shute does not rant but, with passion and expertise, illuminates in beautifully clear prose, laced with well-judged literary and historical references, the scale of the threat posed to our natural world by Climate Change. A ‘must read’ for anyone who is curious and who cares.
Jonathan Dimbleby
Joe Shute is one of Britain’s finest writers on nature. Or indeed, any other subject.
John Lewis-Stempel
What a wonderful read. Joe has interwoven our national pastime, our obsession about the weather, into a fascinating history of our changing climate through the centuries and its defining influence on our consciousness. Told through the eyes of farmers, poets and philosophers as well as the author’s own personal explorations across the country, Forecast is a beautifully written elegy to our natural world and a warning of how quickly it is changing.
William Sieghart

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