Another exciting new project!

I am very excited to share the title and cover for my next book with British Library Publishing.

Penguins, Pineapples and Pangolins: First Encounters with the Exotic will be published in spring 2016. 

Can you remember seeing a giraffe for the first time? Tasting a pineapple? Touching a cactus? Probably not, because in these modern times everyone is very knowing – knowledge is at our fingertips and it can sometimes feel as if there is nothing new to discover. The awe and excitement from that moment has been lost because these objects and experiences have become ordinary to us.

But if we travel back in time just a few hundred years, before the age of globalisation, people were encountering new foods, animals, plants, peoples and cultures for the first time as overseas trade routes opened up. This new book reflects the wonderment and curiosity of these new experiences. Based on the historical collections of the British Library, it uses extracts from a wide variety of sources to reveal the reactions and thoughts of Europeans as they visited new places, tasted new foods and encountered strange animals, peoples and plants for the first time.

If you follow my Twitter account @nonfictioness you may have noticed much of last year was spent tweeting excerpts from the fascinating books I was using for my research for this project. It has been the most fun book to research and the pictures that the British Library have unearthed to complement the text are just stunning. I look forward to sharing more details and blog posts inspired by my research in the future!