With its enchanting song, striking orange bill and endearing willingness to share our living space, the blackbird is one of our best-loved birds. But robins, swifts, goldfinches and blue tits can captivate us equally and, in The Blackbird Diaries, Karen Lloyd shares her deep-rooted affection for all our treasured garden wildlife.

Over the four seasons, she intimately chronicles the drama and the joy, the perils and the pleasures of the natural world as it all unfolds in her garden and on her daily walks in the limestone hills and valleys of Cumbria’s South Lakeland. What emerges is a celebration of landscapes that rarely feature in the existing canon of nature writing, and rare insights into the lives of the species that may be common but are remarkable creatures all.