For forty years Thom's father kept an allotment near his home, and after thirty-nine years Thom joined him with a neighbouring plot.After his father's sudden death, Thom began to write about the year he spent in the soil, under a desperate spell, past blurring into present, a last goodbye. The Allotment Diaries is the result - a melodious, surging, pensive month-by-month portrait of the soil we all have in common.