Tarka the Otter, Paperback

A classic of nature writing, Tarka the Otter was beloved by Rachel Carson, Ted Hughes, and Thomas Hardy, and is a survival story influenced by the author's time fighting in World War I.

In the wild there is no safety. The otter cub Tarka grows up with his mother and sisters, learning to swim, to catch fish--and to fear the cry of the hunter and the flash of the metal trap. Soon he must fend for himself, travelling through rivers, woods, moors, ponds, and out to sea, sometimes with the female otters White-tip and Greymuzzle, and always on the run. Eventually, chased by a pack of hounds, he meets his nemesis, the fearsome Deadlock, and must fight for his life.

Tarka the Otter depicts a fierce struggle for survival in the wild that also carries echoes of the author's experience in the First World War. The result of years spent observing otters in the wild, this book is a celebration of life, the eternal rhythms of nature, and the English countryside.

Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was born in Brockley, London, in 1895. During the First World War he served at the front as an infantryman and later as a transport officer. In 1921 he left London for rural north Devon, where, apart from a period as a farmer in Norfolk from 1937 to 1946, he lived and worked as a writer for the rest of his life. Tarka the Otter, his seventh book, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1928. He published some fifty books in all, among them The Patriot's Progress, Salar the Salmon, and a fifteen-volume semi-autobiographical novel cycle, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. He contributed numerous articles to newspapers and periodicals and broadcast regularly on BBC radio. He was married twice and had eight children.

Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of six books, most recently a collection of his New York Times "Rural Life" columns called More Scenes from the Rural Life. He teaches creative writing at Yale University and lives in upstate New York.

Charles Tunnicliffe (1901-1979) was a painter and printmaker well known for his meticulous, lifelike depictions of animals.