The Moth Snowstorm

A great, rhapsodic, urgent book full of joy, grief, rage and love. The Moth Snowstorm is at once a deeply affecting memoir and a heartbreaking account of ecological impoverishment. It fights against indifference, shines with the deep magic and beauty of the non-human lives around us, and shows how their loss lessens us all. A must-read - Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

An important book about an important subject - the loss of biodiversity locally, nationally and internationally, what this means for humanity and how it could possibly be avoided … The main argument is that we all have in us the capacity to experience joy and wonder from nature … Michael McCarthy is a professional journalist and an accomplished and experienced writer who handles his themes skilfully - Irish Examiner

Impassioned, polemical and personal … In the autobiographical passages nature is a marvel and a solace. [McCarthy’s] descriptions of the night-time clouds of moths - the moth snowstorms of the title - that we saw in the days before farming ruined so much natural habitat are unforgettable, and his recollections of boyhood bird-watching on the River Dee Bay a delight … At its heart, this is a book aiming to persuade those who are broadly sympathetic to think in a different way, and in that it is surely a success - and a joy - Independent

A fascinating and very readable book … full of joy and wonder and luminous moments … McCarthy is a man who remembers not only the Observer’s Book of Birds but the set of Brooke Bond tea cards featuring Charles Tunnicliffe’s beautiful bird pictures. But you don’t have to be of a similar vintage to enjoy this expansive celebration of a subject too often overlooked in the ongoing discourse about man and nature - sheer joy - Dabbler

McCarthy has for years been the doyen of environmental correspondents … he is conversant with the hard facts, the political realities and the moral complexities of the conservation world. But he writes also as a man inspired by the beauty, diversity and abundance of the natural world that we are destroying. This combination of worldly wisdom and deeply felt personal experience makes this a highly original and refreshing account of our current predicament - TLS

Deserves to be widely read - Scotsman

Environmental correspondent Michael McCarthy makes an impassioned plea on behalf of the natural world in this inspiring book - Sunday Express