Hardback, Putnam, first illustrated edition, 1932; with woodcuts by C. F. Tunnicliffe.

Book condition: lacking the dustwrapper, but otherwise a very nice copy.

Tarka the Otter came second in a 2017 poll conducted to find the UK's favourite nature book; a most commendable achievement for a book published nearly 100 years ago. It also received the accolade of being published, in 2009, in Penguin's prestigious Modern Classics series. It has never been out of print.

Soon after the book was published in 1927 amid much acclaim from writers such as Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and Thomas Hardy, it was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. Since then it has been translated into many different languages and reprinted countless times.

The blurb to The Bodley Head's 1978 edition reads in part: 'One night while the moon gleamed out of the clouds in the east, pale and wasted as a bird in the snow, a young bitch otter gave birth to three cubs in a hollow oak tree by the river known as Owlery Holt. The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog-cub called Tarka, which means Little Water Wanderer or Wandering as Water, and was the name given to otters many years ago by men dwelling in hut circles on the moor.

'The story of how Tarka grew to adulthood and lived in the country of the Two Rivers, the Taw and the Torridge, until he was finally caught and killed by his enemy, the great pied hound Deadlock, is now a much-loved classic. Williamson spent five years writing it and claimed that he rewrote it seventeen times before he was satisfied with the result.'

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's Tarka the Otter.)