Clara’s Verdict
John Lewis-Stempel’s The Wood is the kind of book that makes you feel slightly ashamed of every moment you’ve spent indoors when you could have been somewhere with trees. It is also, beneath its lyrical surface, a rigorous and quietly urgent work of natural history — an argument, made through four years of careful observation, for the ecological and psychological necessity of the small wood in the English landscape.
Winner of the 2017 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, serialised on BBC Radio 4 as Book of the Week, and narrated here by Leighton Pugh in a production that suits the material beautifully, The Wood is one of the finest nature audiobooks available in English. That is not a small claim, given the extraordinary quality of recent British nature writing. Lewis-Stempel earns it.
About the Audiobook
Cockshutt Wood is three and a half acres of mixed woodland in south-west Herefordshire. Lewis-Stempel managed it for four years — coppicing trees, raising cows and pigs who roamed freely within it, cutting rides and maintaining the ancient structure of the coppice — and this book is the diary of the final year, by which time he had come to know it with the intimate familiarity that only sustained attention over time can produce: from the root systems of its beeches to the tip of its oaks, from the territorial patterns of its tawny owl to the precise location of the best bluebells in spring.
The book moves through the seasons in the traditional diary format of English nature writing, but Lewis-Stempel is doing something more complex than recording observations. He is making a case. The wood, he argues, is a last refuge — for fox, pheasant, wood mouse, dormouse, and dozens of plant species squeezed out of hedgerows and fields by the relentless simplification of modern agriculture. And it is a refuge for him, too: a place where the obligations of contemporary life recede and something older, simpler, and more essential becomes briefly available.
Lewis-Stempel weaves poetry throughout the text — John Clare, Edward Thomas, Thomas Hood — and the integration is seamless rather than decorative. He is working within and consciously extending a long tradition of pastoral English writing, and his awareness of that tradition gives the book an intellectual depth that goes beyond straightforward nature observation. He is also, more quietly, arguing for the preservation of precisely the kind of small woodland that Cockshutt represents — economically marginal, ecologically irreplaceable, increasingly rare.
The Narration
Leighton Pugh is one of the finest narrators working in British non-fiction audio, and this is among his best work. He has a measured, unhurried quality that suits the diary format perfectly — each seasonal entry arrives with the feeling of a genuine moment of attention rather than a performance — and his handling of the embedded poetry is particularly good. He reads Clare and Thomas as if he means them, which is the only way to read Clare and Thomas. The six-and-a-half-hour runtime passes with the speed of genuine pleasure, which is the highest compliment you can pay to a narrator’s craft.
The BBC Radio 4 serialisation preceded this full audio edition, and listeners who remember hearing extracts on the radio may find the full version even more rewarding — the diary structure unfolds with greater depth over the complete text than it can in a weekly serialisation, and Pugh’s narration rewards sustained listening rather than dipping in and out.
What Readers Say
UK Audible listeners rate The Wood at 4.6 out of 5 from 494 reviews — a substantial corpus that reflects a wide and devoted readership across more than six years of availability. Reviewers frequently describe being surprised by how deeply the book affected them. One came to it via a newspaper extract given by a friend, expected it not to be his kind of book, and was hooked within three to four paragraphs. Another described it as « a literary work of some magnitude » and praised Lewis-Stempel’s integration of the pastoral poetic tradition with contemporary ecological observation. A third wrote that it made her want to move back to the English countryside, and that she found herself wanting to read slowly rather than quickly — to stay in the wood as long as possible. A fourth, who knows the area Lewis-Stempel lives, described him simply as « THE author who feels for our wildlife and places — not just writes about them. »
Who Should Listen?
This audiobook is for readers who love nature writing, the English countryside, and books that combine close observation with genuine literary quality. It will also appeal strongly to anyone who has experienced the particular restorative quality that time in woodland provides, and wants to understand more precisely what it is about trees that does that. Lewis-Stempel’s other books — particularly The Running Hare, Meadowland, and The Secret Life of the Owl — are highly recommended companions.
An essential audiobook for any nature-writing collection, and one of the most purely pleasurable listens of recent years.
Find The Wood on Audible UK here: Listen on Audible UK
