Kate Brown

"Why are Kazakhstan and Montana the same place?" asks one chapter of Kate Brown's surprising and unusual journey into the histories of places on the margins, overlooked or erased. It turns out that a ruined mining town in Kazakhstan and Butte, Montana—America's largest environmental Superfund site—have much more in common than one would think, thanks to similarities in climate, hucksterism,...

Three short stories, each focusing on the relationship between mother and child. ‘The Piper Man’ is structured around the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Marie Nicholls is a single mother bringing up her two boys, who are desperately missing their father. When a strange man arrives on their street, they are inexplicably drawn to him, much to Marie's...

From the enclosures in seventeenth-century England to the food forests in modern Amsterdam, this is a big history of little spaces, of nature in urban life, and of gardeners and their gardens through time In the heart of bustling European and American cities lies an overlooked yet vibrant corner of resilience, ingenuity and magic- our gardens. From pre-industrial England to...

'The most brilliant and essential book on Chernobyl since that of Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich' - Irish Times The official death toll of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, described as 'the worst nuclear disaster in history', is only 54, and stories today commonly suggest that nature is thriving there. Yet award-winning historian Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story, one...