The natural world is under siege. Its inhabitants are living truncated lives; starving, constricted, diseased, and neurotic, they cannot be the sorts of creatures they are meant to be. We are used - indeed over-used - to learning about this siege from the perspective of concerned humans. Photos of seals drowned in nets and oiled gulls no longer excite our imagination, and so they excite neither empathy nor resolve. The only way to reignite these imaginations is by way of story. In particular, the story of the besieged needs to be told by the besieged, rather than the besiegers. The reader needs to know what it feels like to return to one's home to find that it has been bulldozed and covered in tarmac, or to have one's child hoisted on board a boat and driven off to learn tricks in a swimming pool. This is a book of stories about the lives of eight animals - one of whom is human - set in modern Britain under the greatest siege of our time: human nature itself.