by Marc Hamer (Harvill Secker £14.99, 416pp)
For more than two decades, Marc Hamer has tended a garden that he doesn’t own. Now he has published what feels more or less like his private gardening journal, in sections with titles such as Pruning Roses, Swifts Arrive and Solstice.
But this is no how-to guide — unless perhaps you classify it as a wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden.
And Hamer knows a thing or two about living with little — indeed, living with more or less nothing apart from the ragged clothes he stood up in.