Park Book Club

We’re excited to be launching Homestead Park’s book club and library this summer! As the weather warms and the world unfurls itself for another season of growth, we are inviting readers to join us in taking time to pause, reflect, and learn.

Our book club will ask what nature teaches us—about care and community, resistance and resilience, and the meaning of hope and humanity in the face of uncertainty—by centring voices of queer, neurodiverse, disabled, and global majority writers from the UK and abroad. Nature is diverse, and with each blade of grass and bend of the light, each bud and buzzing insect, each cloud scuttling across the sky and whisper of wind in the trees comes an opportunity to discover something new about ourselves and our relationship with the earth.

Books offer us a chance to rest the body while exercising the mind, and our book club will encourage slow, deep reading. Instead of choosing a new title every month, we will read a single book across 2-3 months, giving us time to contemplate and connect through community read-along sessions and conversations. We hope you can join us!

Upcoming: Hidden Nature

Our first book of the year Alys Fowler’s Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery. Narrating her time exploring Birmingham’s canal network by inflatable kayak, Hidden Nature is a heartfelt look at the beauty—and often grimy reality—of urban wilds that mirrors Fowler’s experience of coming out as queer and uprooting their life of carefully cultivated gardens.

Monthly read-along and discussion sessions for Hidden Nature will take place on three Saturdays: June 27, July 25, and August 22 from 11-12.30.

We only have a limited number of places so we will be drawing names at random. If you’d like your name to go in the hat, please email homesteadpark@jrf.org.uk or leave a message by calling 01904615900 with your name and contact details by Friday, June 19.

We don’t want expense to be an obstacle, and copies of the book will be available for free from the Homestead Park library.