Spring Rain

From a hardscrabble childhood and vagrancy to the life-enhancing rewards of nurturing both 12 acres and an unusual friendship... Hamer meditations take similar forms, starting down to earth, if not actually in it, and ending taking off for the skies one way or another. His prose mimics this, beginning earthy and becoming airy.

Tim Dee, Guardian, on Seed to Dust

A wonderful book about our relationship with the earth, with other animals and with our own troubled humanity. It has taught me a lot. I feel great love for it

Max Porter, on How to Catch a Mole: A Life in Nature

A wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden

Daily Mail, on Seed to Dust

Hamer lets us in; we learn what his tools feel like in hands hardened by decades of manual labour... But it is also an unlikely love story

Telegraph, on Seed to Dust

A fascinating, lyrical account of the loneliness and beauty of life on the margins

Times Literary Supplement, on How to Catch a Mole: A Life in Nature

Marc Hamer knows how to live - simply, sparely, reverently, abundantly. Spring Rain is a tonic for the soul.

Sy Montgomery, author of How to Be A Good Creature

A beguiling and poetic memoir - illustrated with Hamer's line drawings - he encourages us to tune into the consoling rhythms of nature

Bookseller

A memoir infused with wisdom and a deep love of nature, as well as a how-to book for finding peace of mind

Saga

Interwoven with the writer's deep-seated love of the natural world... I highlighted many passages while reading this book

Countryman

'A sublime meditation on life, love, nature and family, woven with the wisdom of age gained through a life well lived'

Lee Schofield, author of Wild Fell

An illuminating, powerful read

Woman's Own

A book of great but tender power; acute, wise and intimately observed, speaking with the unmistakable voice of the land itself - which is equally unmistakably Hamer's own. And what a voice that is!

Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild

Hamer's prose proceeds by association and by charismatic detail... but it also has a strong sense of arc, of change...He has an inclination to celebrate and express love-an inclination that seems built out of the humus of a difficult childhood...he is not an Adam cast out of the garden but "a boy cast out of hell," and into a series of gardens.

New Yorker

Patterned with Hamer's gifts for observation, compression, and tone. . . I tend to think of a garden story as inevitably circular: every winter is followed by a spring, again and again. Hamer's garden story has that element, but it is as neighborly with the mortal arrow as it is with the return

Rivka Galchen, New Yorker

Hamer explains why a garden is not just a place of work - it's also a place of worship.

Margaret Roach, New York Times

Mr. Hamer has found his ideal calling in this book stitched together from small essays, a genre in which such capricious mutability of opinion is not only tolerated but encouraged. Through his words, we connect with the ultimate text, the landscape itself.

Wall Street Journal

Hamer's signature prose, rich with precise, detailed observations that evoke the luminous wonder that informs and illuminates all being, is on full display

Vancouver Sun

A breathtaking narrative that transcends genre and geography.

Shelf Awareness *

Hamer has a canny way of divining the sacred in the quotidian

Booklist

No facet of nature, however subtle, eludes Marc Hamer - and I relish being invited along on each intimate adventure

Margaret Roach, author of A Way to Garden

Life's affirmation is to be found everywhere

Toronto Star

Contentment between two covers; mindfulness told as a love story. Everyone should read this and feel a little better

Ruth Allen, author of GROUNDED