A hill is not a mountain.You climb it for you, then you put it quietly inside you, in a cupboard marked'Quite A Lot Of Hills' where it makes its infinitesimal mark on who you are. Ring the Hill is a book written around, and about, hills: it includes anorthern hill, a hill that never ends and the smallest hill in England. Eachchapter takes a type of hill – whether it's a knoll, cap, cliff, tor or even amere bump – as a starting point for one of Tom's characteristicallyunpredictable and wide-ranging explorations.Tom's lyrical, candid prose roams from an intimate relationship with a particularcove on the south coast, to meditations on his great-grandmother and a lesson onwhat goes into the mapping of hills themselves. Because a good walk in thehills is never just about the hills: you never know where it might lead.

Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours on a street where all the houses are set on a tilt, slowly subsiding into the excavated space below. Told through Benji's voice and a colourful variety of others over a deeply joyful and strange twelve-month period, it's a story about growing up, the oddness beneath the everyday, what we once believed the future would be, and those times in life when anything seems possible. 1983 is steeped in the distinctive character of a setting far weirder than it might at first appear: from robots living next door, and a school caretaker who is not all he seems, to missing memories and the aliens Benji is certain are trying to abduct him.

Inspired by our native landscapes, saturated by the shadows beneath trees and behind doors, listening to the run of water and half-heard voices, Tom Cox's first collection of short stories is a series of evocative and unsettling trips into worlds previously visited by the likes of M. R. James and E. F. Benson. Railway tunnels, the lanes and hills of the Peak District, family homes, old stones, shreds fluttering on barbed wire, night drawing in, something that might be an animal shifting on the other side of a hedge: Tom has drawn on his life-long love of weird fiction, folklore and nature's unregarded corners to write a collection of stories that will delight fans old and new, and leave them very uneasy about turning the reading lamp off.

'A marvellously inventive and imaginative fiction. A tremendous novel' William Boyd'A relatable and compelling read ... Anyone would love it' Dorian Cope'Funny, thought-provoking and astoundingly clever ... What will I be able to read after Villager? I'll just read it again, I guess. And again. Just cancel all other books' Adele Nozedar, author of The Hedgerow Handbook'One chapter unfolds as dialogue with a search engine; others are narrated by the moor itself. A rich potpourri that keeps us busy enough not to worry about what it adds up to' Anthony Cummins, Mail on SundayThere's so much to know. It will never end, I suspect, even when it does. So much in all these lives, so many stories, even in this small place.Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over...

Sure, sex is great, but have you ever cracked open a new notebook and written something on the first page with a really nice pen?The story behind Notebook starts with a minor crime: the theft of Tom Cox's rucksack from a Bristol pub in 2018. In that rucksack was a journal containing ten months worth of notes, one of the many Tom has used to record his thoughts and observations over the past twelve years. It wasn't the best he had ever kept – his handwriting was messier than in his previous notebook, his entries more sporadic – but he still grieved for every one of the hundred or so lost pages.This incident made Tom appreciate how much notebook-keeping means to him: the act of putting pen to paper has always led him to write with an unvarnished, spur-of-the-moment honesty that he wouldn't achieve on-screen.Here, Tom has assembled his favourite stories, fragments, moments and ideas from those notebooks, ranging from...

Peter's mum and dad are worried. Over the last twelve months they've noticed ferocious changes taking place in their son. It's not just the mumbling and the cloud of melancholy that seems to hover permanently over his ever-more-militant mop of curly hair. It's not even the oversized trousers or the numerous metal chains that hang off them. The problem is that Peter, who is fourteen, wants to be a musician - a rock star preferably, but anything else that involves a guitar, gets him bags of money and free CDs, and gives him access to unlimited scantily clad groupies will suffice (as long as it's not classical). Uncoincidentally, ever since the advent of this new ambition, Peter's grades at school have plummeted from very good to somewhere below mediocre. What is to be done? In the spirit of intellectual enquiry, Peter and music-critic, Tom Cox, set off in a Ford Focus on a journey to the dark heart of Britain's musical heritage, to get the inside track on whether being a...

As a teenager in Nottingham, Tom Cox was possessed. Despite the best endeavours of his frankly rather groovy parents, nascent fashion sense and regular exposure to credible music from an early age, he was inexorably drawn into the bizarre, esoteric world that is golf, with its male-bonding rituals and strange trousers. And thus a strange hybrid was born -- from 1988 to 1995, Tom was Midlands golf's answer to Iggy Pop.Assisted by his fellow junior members at the local club, he cut a swathe through the golfing establishment, putting dead animals in his fellow golfers' shoes, setting fire to the club professional's shop, bringing Colin Montgomerie close to tears and repeatedly wearing the wrong colour of socks. On the golf course he felt simultaneously at home and somehow alienated. But Tom also wanted to be (and became) the best, taking five years out of normal adolescent existence to live, breathe, walk and talk nothing but the sport he loved....

21st-Century Yokel explores the way we can be tied inescapably to landscape, whether we like it or not, often through our family and our past. It's not quite a nature book, not quite a humour book, not quite a family memoir, not quite folklore, not quite social history, not quite a collection of essays, but a bit of all six.It contains owls, badgers, ponies, beavers, otters, bats, bees, scarecrows, dogs, ghosts, Tom's loud and excitable dad and, yes, even a few cats. It's full of Devon's local folklore – the ancient kind, and the everyday kind – and provincial places and small things. But what emerges from this focus on the small are themes that are broader and bigger and more definitive.The book's language is colloquial and easy and its eleven chapters are discursive and wide-ranging, rambling even. The feel of the book has a lot in common with the country walks Tom Cox was on when he composed much of it: it's bewitched by fresh air, intrepid...

As a teenager, Cox dreamed of sporting immortality. For four years he devoted himself to the game of golf. And then, one day, he walked away. But as he got older, those dreams kept coming back. Perhaps it was turning thirty, perhaps it was having his first hole in one, but he decided it was time to start again, to live the dream for real.So he switched off his computer, grabbed his checked trouser and headed for the golf course. To turn pro. The Open Championship was only five of the best rounds of his life away, and given a few warm-up tournaments, how hard could it be?

Meet The Bear—a cat who carries the weight of the world on his furry shoulders, and whose wise, owl-like eyes seem to ask, Can you tell me why I am a cat please? Like many intellectuals, The Bear would prefer a life of quiet solitude with plenty of time to gaze forlornly into space and contemplate society's ills. Unfortunately, he is destined to spend his days surrounded by felines of a significantly lower IQ. There is Janet, a large man cat who often accidentally sets fire to his tail by walking too close to lighted candles; Ralph, a preening tabby who enjoys meowing his own name at 5AM; and Shipley, Ralph's brother, who steals soup but is generally relaxed once you pick him up and turn him upside down. And then there's Tom Cox, writing with wit and charm about the unexpected adventures that go hand-in-hand with a life at the beck and call of four cats. This heartwarming Sunday Times bestselling memoir about a man at the mercy of his unpredictable,...