Forecast: A Diary of the Lost Seasons

Join Joe Shute as he travels across Britain tracing the history of our seasons and discovering how they are changing.

We talk about them. We plan our lives around them. The changing seasons are part of us all. But what happens when the weather changes beyond recognition?

Joe Shute has spent years unpicking Britain’s love affair with the weather, poring over the centuries of folklore, customs and rituals our seasons have inspired.

But in recent years Shute has noticed a curious thing: the British seasons are changing far faster and far more profoundly than we realise. Daffodils in December, frogspawn in November, swallows that no longer fly home, floods, wildfires and winters without snow. Nothing is behaving as it should, sending nature into an increasing state of flux.

In Forecast, Shute travels all over Britain tracing the history of the seasons, and discovering the extent to which we are now growing disconnected from them. While documenting these warped rhythms caused by the changing weather, he records the parallels in his personal journey as he and his wife struggle to conceive a child.

This is a book that races to keep up with the march of the seasons as they rapidly change course. It examines how the weather is reshaping the world around us, and asks what happens to centuries of culture, memory and identity when the very thing they subsist on is slipping away.