That's what Rob Cowen discovered after moving to a new home in northern England. After ten years in London he was suddenly adrift, searching for a sense of connection. He found himself drawn to a square-mile patch of waste ground at the edge of town. Scrappy, weed-filled, this heart-shaped tangle of land was the very definition of overlooked--a thoroughly in-between place that capitalism no longer had any use for, leaving nature to take its course. Wandering its meadows, woods, hedges, and fields, Cowen found it was also a magical, mysterious place, haunted and haunting, abandoned but wildly alive--and he fell in fascinated love.

Common Ground is a true account of that place and Cowen's transformative journey through its layers and lives, but it's much more too. As the land's stories intertwine with events in his own life--and he learns he is to become a father for the first time--the divisions between human and nature begin to blur and shift. The place turns out to be a mirror, revealing what we are, what we're not and how those two things are ultimately inseparable.

This is a book about discovering a new world, a forgotten world on the fringes of our daily lives, and the richness that comes from uncovering the stories and lives--animal and human--contained within. It is an unforgettable piece of nature writing, part of a brilliant tradition that stretches from Gilbert White to Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald.

"I am dreaming of the edge-land again," Cowen writes. Read Common Ground, and you, too, will be dreaming of the spaces in between, and what--including us--thrives there.