Nick Major

The Living MountainNan ShepherdCanongate, £14.99

The idea of nature as a restorative for our damaged psyches has been around for a long time, at least since the beginning of the romantic period in the late eighteenth century.

Underland: A Deep Time JourneyRobert MacFarlane​Hamish HamiltonI first read Robert MacFarlane’s entrancing book, The Wild Places, five or six years ago., £20

Dave Eggers likes to throw his characters into bizarre situations, often in places far away from home.

THE final part of Louise Welsh’s Plague Times trilogy starts seven years after the outbreak of the Sweats. The flu-like pandemic that spread across the world has abated, and the survivors are left to either rebuild society or ensure its continued disarray. Stevie Flint, the main character in A Lovely Way to Burn, and Magnus McFall, from Death is a Welcome Guest, have escaped the chaos of London and found a new home in the Orkney Islands. They are both tired of surviving and want to regenerate some semblance of normalcy and democracy. During the last few years, however, Stevie “discovered a talent for violence” and behind her peace-loving exterior she is “secretly longing for some danger to make life seem important again”.

IN Homer’s Odyssey, nepenthe is the drug administered by Helen to treat the sorrows of Menelaus’s guests after the Trojan War. It is also the name Norman Douglas chose for his fictional island off the south coast of Italy where he set his hedonistic 1917 novel South Wind.

WHEN birds sing people hear what they want to hear. This is true in more ways than one. Nowadays when the dawn chorus is in full swing, most people are on their way to work, listening to whatever is playing through their headphones. Two hundred years ago, John Keats sat under a plum tree in Hampstead, listened to a nightingale and heard the ancients speak. “The sounds of birds tell us back our own tales,” writes Richard Smyth in this entertaining and idiosyncratic new book. For Keats “the nightingale’s song was a constant, a single, unvarying song, a golden thread connecting him with the far-off past.” This diminutive brown bird has been a favourite of poets down the ages — Virgil, Petrarch, Milton and Coleridge to name but a few.

IF you spend enough time traipsing around the Scottish mountains you will meet two species of irritants. The first is the midge, which, save donning a beekeeper’s suit, you’re stuck with. The second, and more beastly, is the Munro bagger. In Walking the Song, his new collection of old work, Hamish Brown describes meeting one.

YOU could dedicate a lifetime to reading dystopian novels. As for utopian ones, a week of solid reading would see you through the best of them. There’s a reason utopias don’t appear much in literature. Everyone can imagine what catastrophe looks like; peace and happiness on earth, however, is far more elusive. But also, where’s the drama in everyone agreeing with each other? In John Burnside’s curious short novel Havergey, Ben, or The Watcher, tells the protagonist, John, that “you get to Utopia, or something like it, by having a dream, or building a time machine. William Morris – A Dream of John Ball, H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury – The Toynbee Convector.”

SOMETIMES a book comes along that is so egregious one struggles to think of anything positive to write about it. Even the worst duds usually have a few redeeming features. After finishing The Goose Samaritan, however, I knew this review would be hell to write. Some critics enjoy slating a work. For most of us, however, it is a thankless task. Perhaps out of some misguided sense of compassion, I am always more lenient with debutants. But in this case – with a heavy heart – I’m making an exception.