'Although there is much in this world that is incomprehensible, you can nevertheless discover a meaning as long as you have managed to limit your field of search.'

Fredrik Sjöberg - collector, romantic, explorer - spends his life tracing the smallest details of the natural world. In these two beautifully wrought tales he meditates on the joy of little things, childhood memories, long-forgotten Swedish entomologists, earthworms, wine-making, the National Parks of the United States, the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.

'Digressive, discursive and delightful'Daily Telegraph

'A joy . . . Fredrik Sjöberg's best-selling memoirThe Fly Trapmarked him as a maestro of the episodic. Here, he completes a trilogy'Nature

'Thoroughly entertaining, beguilingly uncategorizable ... By his own admission Sjöberg has a "butterfly mind" ... What insures this approach against triviality is the author's patient alertness to pattern, to telling correspondence' Nat Segnit,The Times Literary Supplement