This book is a challenge to review as it is quite unique in its formatting and storytelling. This is by no means a criticism, I absolutely loved it.
Catrina Davis explores the impact of climate change on the earth and humans. She intersperses her text with key statistics of relevant events. She demonstrates changes by personalising the facts with an account of Ralph Hedley Collard's life growing up in rural Exmoor. She spent time with him and the stories he tells are a valuable insight into the old ways and a lost style of living. The drastic changes he had observed in his lifetime, indicate our urgent need to revert to these early patterns of life.
Collard talks about his childhood and adult experiences, all of them littered with a love of the natural world and his experiences in it, both as a poacher, then a conservationist. Davis has provided an outstanding, deeply emotional read that crosses numerous genres.

A beautiful book that does full justice to the friend that it commemorates. Catrina Davies perfectly captures the Exmoor dialect of a man who worked his entire life on the land, in the woodlands, hedgerows and moors. He must have been quite the character. This is a layered book. It tells the life of the man, rechristened Thomas for the purposes of the book, but flits around in two timelines, telling his life story in the last years of his life, when he was in a wheelchair, but also his memories in chronological order as Catrina pieces together his extraordinary life as he told it to her, aware that she wanted to write a book about him. All this, interleaved with facts and comments on how we are destroying the natural world, the world whose downfall is mirrored by the deterioration of Thomas’s own body.

Needless to say, I adored this book. I couldn’t wait to get back to it to find out just how Thomas ended up in a wheelchair, while marvelling at the full and adventurous life he lived. It very cleverly written; almost a thriller.

<i>Disclaimer: My sincere thanks to the author and publisher for making this available as a digital ARC on NetGalley. My views are all my own. </i> I can recommend another of Catrina Davies’s books: Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve read a good way through and it’s equally well-written.

I’m not sure if this review will be any good, mainly because I’m not quite sure how to put how I feel about this book into words, but I will give it a go anyway.

This was one of the most unique reading experiences of a non-fiction book I think I have ever had. It almost felt like I was reading a novel - like I could’ve been reading a book dedicated to one of the characters in Michael Christie’s ‘Greenwood’.

Once Upon A Raven’s Nest is a biography written by Catrina Davies in the perspective of Ralph Hedley Collard - an Exmoor man through & through - based on the time she spent with him and the stories he shared with her.

It mainly followed Hedley’s childhood, his adventurous work life and his quest for love. Not until the end did I realise that all of those aspects of his life were formed, and told, around nature. Most of his tales were laced with birdsong or the excitement of a wildlife encounter, and almost all of them were told amongst trees.

It was not what I expected at all. I was expecting a nature memoir of sorts, following a man’s experiences of Exmoor’s wildlife. What I got was a fraction of that and so much more.

Woven between Hedley’s trials & tribulations, are statistics and time stamps of important environmental events before, during and after his time on Earth. Highlighting how much damage and destruction our planet has faced in the space of one human lifetime.

Davies’ writing is extraordinary. I was left unknowing of how groundbreaking this book is right until the very last page, when all the emotions hit me in waves. I had to sit for a while after finishing it to comprehend what I had just read, what wisdom I had just gained - it’s one of those books that will stay with me for a while.

The Devonian tones of Hedley’s stories were pleasantly familiar, and transported me to a dimly lit pub on the moors on a rainy day, sharing life stories with strangers over a pint. Around 400 pages later, I felt like I knew that stranger.

I formed such a deeper connection to this genre-defying book than I expected. I recommend it to everyone.

A story of love and loss. Ralph’s story. Earth’s story. Our story.

Thank you to NetGalley & Quercus Books for DRC.

This is a book I loved, part story of a man living in the country and part reflection on our relationship with the environment and how we are in a time of changes.
The two sides work well together and I loved the storytelling and the story of Thomas.
I don't always agree with the author as this is the story of a person in a specific environment. An African farmer or a South European farmer could share some of Thomas' choices but some would be different.
What I loved was how it made me think about the relationship with the land: I'm a keen gardener so I know what it means the wheel of the seasons and the feel of the earth on your hands.
But I also work in high tech and it's something very far from the natural world.
A thought provoking and compelling book.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Absolutely loved this book. I enjoyed the storytelling aspect, coupled with the insets of what we have lost / stand to lose from the natural environment. It gets across too the challenges and toughness of working the moors / lands, away from the gentrified scenes often presented of the rural life. The use of gently Devon dialect kept it feeling true, and the characters came through well. I could imagine sitting in a stone-walled pub, nursing a pint, and hearing the tales firsthand.

This book wasn't what I expected. I thought it was going to be mostly about the nature and landscape of Exmoor. There is certainly an element of that, but it is actually mostly about a local man, Ralph Collard. Nevertheless, it is an interesting story and certainly gives something of the flavour of the local culture.
The book is written in the first person. That would be fine, but it is not an autobiography, but a biography, so that comes across as a bit strange. What is more, according to the preface, it is not a biography but a 'portrait'. That means that it has an unreliable narrator (in that sense, that does fit with a first-person narrative). That does make the book difficult to interpret. How much exaggeration is there in all the tall stories in the first half? I don't know that I really believe the story of his father cutting the tree down, for example. How complete is the transformation from poacher to conservationist? We don't know. It is, thankfully, not the case that the book is a hagiography. It is quite clear that the protagonist's troubles are in part brought on by his own actions, and it is also obvious that he was lacking in social skills.
It is written mostly in normal English, but with some dialogue with dialect mixed in. That seemed a bit random (why are some bits in dialect and others not?), but on the whole added to the local flavour. Occasionally, there are fragments rather than sentences, and I wasn't sure if those were bits that needed editing or also meant to be dialect. There are also some errors; Ernest Bevin was born in 1881, not 1804, for instance. Maybe those will be cleared up by the publication release (I am reviewing a pre-publication copy).
The book is not written in chronological structure, although each chapter is clearly labelled with its date. I didn't find that the hopping about in time helped me. Interspersed between the chapters are pages with key environmental facts like rising carbon dioxide concentrations and biodiversity reductions. It was not entirely clear to me how they fitted with the rest of the book. Are they statements related to the actions of the protagonist's father and his own actions in his early years? Parallels between the destruction of individuals and the destruction of the natural world? Placing the biodiversity reduction of Devon in an international context? I didn't really get it.
In summary, the book took some getting into but it was an interesting read about a man who was certainly an exceptional character.
This review is based on a pre-publication copy of the book kindly provided by the publisher in return for an honest review, via the NetGalley platform.

This is a book that is hard to define by genre, it is part biography of a man and part transition of a world, but it absolutely can be classified as a beautiful and timely must-read book. I closed the cover in tears, shed for the life of both a single human being and the whole earth, as Catrina Davies wove her intimate memoir of Thomas Hedley into an everyman call to see the changes humanity has collectively wrought on the planet that sustains us.

The changes that we reflect on in Tomas Hedley’s life have far reaching consequences for him and for us all. Our changing relationship with work and the type of work that we do, our increasing disconnection from the land and reliance on third parties to provide our needs, our desire to get away from the places we grow up in rather than commit ourselves to them. All of these things can be seen in or around Thomas’s life and all draw us towards an unstable, increasingly catastrophic, future.

The voice belongs to Thomas, brought to us through Catrina with some creativity but no loss of clarity, and it allows us into the small, every day, private thoughts of a man we do not know but quickly becomes part of us. It is a deeply affecting narrative. Thomas is no hero and makes no claims to be but so much is revealed in his reflections on a life lived through rapidly changing times through which he both thrives and falters.

Often memoir and biography is about profile and prominence, but this one is about conscious experience, noticing the ways the world is changing and the impact this is having. It is a book to slow you down, to make you look around, to reconnect you to the people and place where you are, all the things that we need to do in order to shift our way of life towards one in communion with our environment rather than conflict.

Progress, the removal of limitations, has been our guiding star throughout this period but it moves our focus into a future that is always imagined and just out of reach, rather than the wonder of the present now. I sometimes wonder what we would do if we could not imagine a future to strive for, would we just dwell in the present moment and absorb it as a miraculous gift? If so, how might that change the world?

Who knows where Once Upon a Raven’s Nest will take you, but it feels to me like there is some magic in what at first appears such a small thing, but as the blurb suggests when you add it all together all those small things become a devastating and beautiful whole. I’m already struggling to see how any book in 2023 will be a greater blessing.