“Connell gives a deeply personal account of taking care of sheep on his County Longford farm in Ireland. Through the seasons, he learns lessons from the farm, family, and himself. By lambing season, he feels like a changed man. His journey is complete with new lambs to take care of and some loss to struggle with, and he ultimately discovers that love has been carrying him through all of this: the love found in nature and caring for it. This is a poetic meditation on what nature can teach us. An excellent choice for those who love James Herriot’s All Creatures Great & Small.”

– Booklist

"The Lambing Season is what I call a real book, an honest book. I can hear John Connell's voice lilting off the page, and telling me the many truths he has discovered: truths I need to know, and everyone needs to know." 

– Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows

"A beautiful and soothing book, at once far-reaching and intimate, it serves as a sublime exhortation to stop and savour our precious and fleeting time on earth, to be grateful for the life we're given."
 

– Donal Ryan, author of The Queen of Dirt Island and The Spinning Heart

"This is such a lovely book, beautifully constructed and crafted. As everyone knows who has enjoyed The Farmer's Son, John Connell writes like a dream. In The Lambing Season, he returns to the old family farm in Longford, and the contours of a landscape both starkly real and richly imagined, to quarry that inexhaustible seam, the simple yet profound life lessons that come from farming. This is a wise and humane book, a book to lift our spirits."

– Michael Wood, author of The Story of China and In Search of the Dark Ages</

Praise for The Farmer's Son

"A vivid and sharply observed account of a way of life which is almost invisible, a new hidden Ireland. It is also a fascinating portrait of a single sensibility, a born noticer, someone on whom nothing is lost, observing birth and death, the landscape and his own heritage."

– Colm Toibin

"A gorgeous read, full of warmth, truth and tentative wonder. John Connell has written "an elegy to the nature I know", but this book is an elegy to so much more—to art and myth and sorrow and longing."

– Sara Baume, author of Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither