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‘Mark Cocker is one of my favourite nature writers. The Nature of Seeing will transform how you view the world around us. This fascinating book draws on years of Mark Cocker’s own illuminating observations during what he calls a “lifelong loving affair” with nature. Just one encounter with an ant in his bath inspires a meditation on the future of humankind! ‘

Martha Kearney

‘There can be no better companion for anybody interested in and concerned about the living world than Mark Cocker. In The Nature of Seeing, his revisiting of highlights and high times in his long and important career as Britain’s most passionate, most measured and, certainly, most sentient natural historian, there is no self-regarding quest for “mindfulness” nor any geeky, competitive boasting of his encounters; there is simply knowledge, experience and a rare integrity. With Cocker at our sides, we are both observer and observed, equals in the very best of company.‘

Jim Crace

Cocker knows and shows how to pay attention to the dazzling world in and around us. You’ll put down his luminous book regretting all the living you’ve missed out on by not reading it earlier, but relieved that you’ve found it before it’s too late.

Charles Foster, author of The Edges of the World

I have been consumed by the act of looking for all of my writerly life. This year I turned it into a book, The Nature of Seeing (Jonathan Cape, Oct 2026), with help from my agent Sophie Lambert and editor Bea Hemming and a title courtesy of Mary Muir. Being able to look carefully at the world is not a passive act, it is hugely dynamic. In the preface I write:

‘The gift of sight is not, of course, granted to all and those who lack it often develop compensating sensory awareness that is even more remarkable. Yet I have come to believe that the act of seeing is one of the most important things that many of us will ever do. It is the precondition of all our understanding. Leonardo considered it the essential prelude to love for the world. It earths our experience of the truth. It is the foreground to all our imaginative work, it leads us to a state of wonder, to a sense of what is most sacred in life. Seeing is vital to being healthful and even to being truly alive.’

It is the slimmest of my 14 books, yet I couldn’t be more excited. I note further in the introduction:

‘This is by a fair margin the shortest book I have published but, in one sense, it is the most important. The themes and the conceptual frame have drawn upon a whole life. More than anything I have previously written, it tries to capture parts of myself that are most precious. It is a distillate of my Nature looking, which has been continuous since I was twelve. My deepest hope is that some of those first feelings for the living world are still apparent here.’