Our oaken bones - Merlin Hanbury-Tenison

SHORTLISED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2025

An enormously moving and inspiring story about war, trauma, nature and rebirth, written with infectious passion and unsparing honesty. I loved it. - DOMINIC SANDBROOK

Scholarly, wise, funny, charming, terrifying and thrilling... I adored it all, every page. - JOANNA LUMLEY

Both a comfort and an inspiration - CHLOE DALTON, author of Raising Hare

This is a lovely book - wise, brave, thoughtful, painfully intimate - but with a remarkable spiritual and environmental vision. - RORY STEWART

An extraordinarily courageous, urgent and powerful book. - ISABELLA TREE

Deeply compelling... emotional, informative, pleasurable. I believe that this is an important work with planet-sized dreams and ambitions. Perhaps the greatest philosophy or teachable lesson that came to me off the page is that dominion comes with responsibility. - RUSSELL CROWE

I love this book. - RICK STEIN

Powerfully enchanting, written with verve and imbued with hope. - GUY SHRUBSOLE


I lie on the rock to let my limbs dry after my immersion in the river. My bones warm. I have no towel but the moss is grateful for the additional moisture that I bring as the water runs off me and into its spongy web of roots and branches. I look up through the canopy and time freezes as the oak leaves drift gently backwards and forwards, dappling the light as it falls onto my body.

I am home.

Reeling from the pain of devastating miscarriages and suffering from PTSD after military adventures in Afghanistan, Merlin and his wife Lizzie decide to leave the bustle of London and return to Merlin's childhood home, a Cornish hill farm called Cabilla in the heart of Bodmin Moor.

There, they are met by unexpected challenges: a farm slipping ever further into debt, the discovery that the overgrazed and damaged woods running throughout the valley are in fact one of the UK's last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest, and the sudden and near catastrophic strickening by Covid of Merlin's father, the explorer Robin. As they fall more in love with the rainforest that Merlin had adventured in as a child, so begins a fight to save not only themselves and their farm, but also one of the world's most endangered habitats.

Our Oaken Bones is an honest and intimate true story about renewal, the astonishing healing power of nature, and our duty to heal it in return.

For fans of The Salt Path and The Lost Rainforests of Britain.