Available now for Kindle pre-order. Publishing Sept 16 and only 99p - the first of three linked monographs on English prose writing about nature and landscape in the heyday of the genre around 1900. Edward Thomas was something of a prodigy, publishing his first nature book when he was only 19. Obviously a lower middle class boy from Wandsworth didn't manage an achievement like that unaided. He had a significant mentor in James Ashcroft Noble, who posthumously also became Thomas's father-in-law. Noble was a significant writer, critic and journalist in his own right - up to his death he was publishing in the famous (and notorious) Yellow Book . One of those Yellow Book essays most certainly had an effect on his protege. This was the cautionary tale of the Scottish writer Alexander Smith who became an overnight poetic sensation, compared with Byron, only to have his reputation crushed by a vindictive critic. Rather than hiding in shame, Smith reinvented himself as a