"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 Tóibín

"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