A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing, and an incomparable and enthralling meditation on times past.--John Banville

He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist's eye and a scientist's sensibility.--Colm Tóibín

In its landscape, history, language, and folklore, the Connemara region on Ireland's wild and windswept West Coast is a dramatic and breathtaking place. From its fabled villages, seaside cliffs, bogs, lakes, coral beaches, stark mountains, and ever-meandering country roads lined with stone walls, this rugged kingdom surprises and inspires, and nobody knows this more than artist, cartographer, and celebrated writer Tim Robinson.

In A Little Gaelic Kingdom, Robinson brings this enchanting Irish peninsula rapturously to life. Setting off, he embarks on a walking journey, traversing and exploring the natural world, while revealing the history, mystery, language, and people that have indelibly shaped this much-mythologized countryside. From the glacial valley of Maam to the fishing villages and rocky shorelines of the region's archipelago, Robinson carries encyclopedic knowledge, great curiosity, and a deep love of place and its inhabitants with him on this engaging and evocative journey.

Beautifully crafted and intimately rendered, A Little Gaelic Kingdom is a timeless and revelatory work of travel and nature writing.

Here is Connemara, experienced at a walker's pace. From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place's geography, ecology, and history.

We begin with the earth right in front of his boots, as Robinson unveils swaths of fiontarnach--fall leaf decay. We peer from the edge of the cliff where Robinson's house stands on rickety stilts. We closely examine an overgrown patch of heather, a flush of sphagnum moss. And so, footstep by footstep, moment by moment, Robinson takes readers deep into this storied Irish landscape, from the quibbling, contentious terrain of Bogland to the shorelines of Inis Ní to the towering peaks of Twelve Pins.

Just as wild and essential as the countryside itself are its colorful characters, friends and legends and neighbors alike: a skeletal, story-filled sheep farmer; an engineer who builds bridges, both physical and metaphorical; a playboy prince and cricket champion; and an enterprising botanist who meets an unexpected demise. Within a landscape lie all other things, and Robinson rejoices in the universal magic of becoming one with such a place, joining with [t]he sound of the past, the language we breathe, and our frontage onto the natural world.

Situated at the intersection of mapmaking and mythmaking, Listening to the Wind is at once learned and intimate, elegiac and magnificent--an exceptionally rich book about one place which is also about the whole world (Robert Macfarlane).

Best Fiction, Florida Historical Society, Patrick D. Smith Award, 2015. Rating: R] The Fourth novel in the Tropical Frontier series, The Cow Hunters is the sequel to The Good Dog.The Florida Prairie, 1860, cattle country. War looms, but to the settlers living along a jungled, tropical creek, it all seems very far away. For Becky Hackensaw, there are much more pressing matters, such as providing an education for her six children, but where to find someone willing to brave an uninhabited wilderness overrun with wild animals, alligators, poisonous snakes, and bloodthirsty mosquitoes?

The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants' traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants' traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. After a visit with his wife in 1972, Tim Robinson moved to the islands, where he started making maps and gathering stories, eventually developing the idea for a cosmic history of rainn, the largest of the three islands. Pilgrimage is the first of two volumes that make up Stones of Aran, in which Robinson maps the length and breadth of rainn. Here he circles the entire island, following a clockwise, sunwise path in quest of the good step, in which walking itself becomes a form of attention and contemplation.

Like Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, Stones of Aran is not only a meticulous and mesmerizing study of place but an entrancing and altogether unclassifiable work of literature. Robinson explores Aran in both its elemental and mythical dimensions, taking us deep into the island's folklore, wildlife, names, habitations, and natural and human histories. Bringing to life the ongoing, forever unpredictable encounter between one man and a given landscape, Stones of Aran discovers worlds.

Robinson's voyage continues in Stones of Aran: Labyrinth

In the second volume of his beloved Connemara trilogy, cartographer Tim Robinson continues to unearth the stories of this rich landscape in Ireland--weaving placelore, etymology, geology, and the meeting of sea and shore into the region's mythologies.

From the northern fiord waters of Killary Harbour to the southern sea-washed islands of Slyne Head, western Connemara awes with a rugged landscape: sloping cliffs, towering mountains, and the ever-present thudding of the Atlantic. And here, within the earth, resides the record of the past; stones with ash-grey centers reveal volcanic episodes, a series of mysteriously arranged quartz boulders reminds us of the ancient secrets held in the soil, and a long-disappeared lake filled in by sand lies beneath a golf course, waiting to be rediscovered.

Mapping more than geography, Tim Robinson charts Connemara's deep relationship to those who have inhabited its surface. The Last Pool of Darkness brims with tales of ghosts, centuries-old land disputes, periods of religious and political upheavals, philosophers entranced by the isolating landscape, poets, mathematicians, artists, fantastical smugglers, the discovery of botanical rarities, trickster fairies, and the delicate balance between humans and nature. Not merely a certain tract of the Earth's surface but an accumulation of connotations, Robinson's Connemara offers readers an opportunity to travel across space and time.

A work of great precision and tenderness, The Last Pool of Darkness is an enchanting addition to the Seedbank series and next chapter in one of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English (Robert Macfarlane).

Best Fiction, Florida Historical Society, Patrick D. Smith Award, 2015.
[Rating: R, for violence and language] The Fourth novel in the award-winning Tropical Frontier series, The Cow Hunters is the sequel to The Good Dog.
The Florida Prairie, 1860, cattle country. War looms, but to the settlers living along a jungled, tropical creek, it all seems very far away. For Becky Hackensaw, there are much more pressing matters, such as providing an education for her six children, but where to find someone willing to brave an uninhabited wilderness overrun with wild animals, alligators, venomous snakes, and bloodthirsty mosquitoes?

Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran is one of the most striking and original literary undertakings of our time. Robinson's ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape, know it as extensively and intimately as possible, and what it takes to make that knowledge, the sense of the landscape itself, come alive in writing. It is a project that draws on the legacies of Thoreau and Joyce, to which Robinson brings his own polymathic gifts as cartographer, mathematician, historian, and, above all, shaper of words.

In Pilgrimage Robinson walked the entire coast of Airann, largest of the Aran islands. In Labyrinth he turns in to the island's interior. These two books--parts of an inseparable whole that can, for all that, be read quite separately from each other--constitute a vast polyphonic composition, at once encyclopedic and lyrical, scientific and surprisingly personal. Exploring the illimitable complexity and bounty contained in the seemingly limited confines of a single island, Robinson invites us to look without and within and to see the wonder of the world.

The Homesteaders is the sequel to Tim Robinson's first novel, Tales of Old Florida, and answers a myriad of questions that persist. Many of our most loved, and hated, characters return to find out what happens to Charlie MacLeod and Salty, his little green bird and constant companion. Is there some power on earth that can bring a broken man once again into the folds of humanity? Will the new preacher's wife, the feisty Maude Wickman, split the community along racial lines? Can anyone save the day? And if so, who?

It is a thousand, thousand years into the future and our world has changed.

This is a world of super science, high technology, and a world of magical wonders. It is a world made of many genetically-altered human beings and a few creatures rumored to be not of this world. A small fraction of the population has an ability to use their minds with telekinetic abilities; some far beyond the ability of the average human. Many men use their super mind-powered abilities to help others and for bettering of mankind; however, others may use their abilities for selfish gains and to gain power hoping for world conquest. Anyone that uses his/her superhuman abilities for evil gain are called Inmortal humans, and anyone that uses his/her abilities for good are Immortal (or Emmortal) humans. Both sides continually clash with each other. While one side strives to control mankind and wants man under their control, the good immortals want man to live in peace, love, and harmony.

This is the world of the muffins. Muffins are little blue-headed humans whom many evil inmortals hate. Now, read on and let your imagination flow to New America, once in a coming time.

[Rating: PG-13] From the award-winning author of Florida-based historical fiction (Patrick D. Smith Award, Florida Historical Society, 2015, 2018, 2021, 2022). Tales of Old Florida is the First novel in the award-winning Tropical Frontier series. NOTE: This volume INCLUDES The Wreckers, the separate and stand-alone novel formatted especially for young readers.

The Southern Frontier: A road-less, watery wilderness, uninviting to all but the most stouthearted and adventurous. As great cities were springing up in places like St. Louis, Denver, and San Francisco, the lower peninsula of Florida endured. Here, the panther, the alligator, and the bald eagle remained safe from the restless, meddlesome hands of civilization, continuing as they had for eons past. Renegade Indians, pirates, hurricanes, and man-eating animals - not to mention venomous snakes and bloodthirsty hordes of mosquitoes - reigned supreme. It took a certain kind of person to boldly venture into such an inhospitable environment where a man had only himself and his family upon which to depend. It took men and women with not only vision, but backbone and grit, people like the MacLeods, Dawsons, and Hackensaws, true pioneers who confronted whatever came their way, together, as a family. From shipwrecks to Indian uprisings to buried treasure, blockade runners to murderous beach tramps, and the sad, lonely life of the solitary beachcomber, Tales of Old Florida takes the reader back to a singular time and place that will never be seen again. Above all, Tales of Old Florida is an epic saga of survival and prosperity, love and love lost, and most important, the power of the human spirit to prevail.

[Rating: PG-13] The Thirteenth novel in the Tropical Frontier series, The Last Caloosa is, in addition, the Third and final novel in the Indian Fighter sub-series.

The proverbial fork in the road: which path to follow? Bridges burned. No turning back. One can never know to where a single, momentary decision might lead, whether it be to a good place, or to a very, very bad place, indeed, to the gates of Hell. From the author of The Cow Hunters.

The Homesteaders is the sequel to Tim Robinson's first novel, Tales of Old Florida, and answers a myriad of questions that persist. Many of our most loved, and hated, characters return to find out what happens to Charlie MacLeod and Salty, his little green bird and constant companion. Is there some power on earth that can bring a broken man once again into the folds of humanity? Will the new preacher's wife, the feisty Maude Wickman, split the community along racial lines? Can anyone save the day? And if so, who?

[Rating: PG-13] The Thirteenth novel in the award-winning Tropical Frontier series, The Last Caloosa is, in addition, the Third and final novel in the Indian Fighter sub-series. The proverbial fork in the road: which path to follow? Bridges burned. No turning back. One can never know to where a single, momentary decision might lead, whether it be to a good place, or to a very, very bad place, indeed, to the gates of Hell.

[Rating: PG-13] The Brigand is the Fifteenth novel in the award-winning Tropical Frontier series.The lives of three young friends are disrupted when one of them, Arabelle O'Shea, is abducted by the Scourge of the Florida Straits, the feared and dreaded pirate, El Diablo Caesar. Will Paco Piñato and Caleb Johnson rescue Arabelle in time? And what of the legendary treasure of Black Caesar, the notorious compatriot of Blackbeard himself? Will it be discovered these many years later? And if so, by whom? Or will it reside in its place of concealment forever?

The Sixth novel in the Tropical Frontier series, Time Rummers is, in addition, the Third novel in the Port Starboard sub-series.

Whatever will be will be. But what happens when dreams become reality, when unbridled imaginations supplant the laws of nature? For Gnarles and Paddy it can be very confusing, but for a certain resident of Port Starboard it can mean the difference between life and death. Can the diminutive drunks find a way to save the day, to upend reality and turn the tables on Father Time? Maybe, but not without a little help from the patron saint of shipwrecked sailors himself.

[Rating: R] The Twenty-fifth novel in the award-winning Tropical Frontier series, The Rum Runner is, in addition, the Fourth novel in the Outpost sub-series.

During Prohibition, liquor flowed. But from whom did they get it? Who would be brave enough? Who would be courageous enough? Some would ask, who would be foolhardy enough to go up against mobsters and gangsters, law enforcement, and revenue agents? Who would risk life and limb to procure and deliver those much-wanted resources to the people?
Who indeed? ... ... The school bell rang.

Orlando Morning Sentinel: TWO DEAD! EIGHT ARRESTED, IN 'GLADES WAR! Within Scores of Miles of Where Wealthy and Society of Country Seek Pleasure, Ashley Gang Routed in Running Pistol Battle! THREE POSSES SCOURING COUNTRY FOR FUGITIVES! Lookout for Desperado's Camp Kills Deputy Sheriff! Camp Stands in Center of Dense Hammock! Wild West Centers in Everglades!

Pirates and Indians? Who would'a thunk? [Rating: PG-13] The Twentieth novel in the award-winning Tropical Frontier series, The Curse of Jamba Lona is, in addition, the Third novel in the Brigand sub-series. Captain Arabelle O'Shea and her crew of former brigands, now wreckers, have struck it rich! Or have they? A fortune in buried treasure, that of the notorious pirate Black Caesar has, by a curious series of circumstance, come into their possession. But they are not alone on this desolate, tropical beach. Chekeika, an Indian boy brimming with curiosity, is watching them; and from his places of concealment, he learns things that will alter the course of not only his life, but of all their lives.

The Tenth novel in the Tropical Frontier series, The River is, in addition, the Second novel in the Indian Fighter sub-series. A bitter old man, a resentful son who never knew his father, and a daughter-in-law who is intent on fixing everything. What could possibly go wrong? Set along the banks of a winding, jungle river, this is a story of reflection, regret, and the power of bullheadedness.

[Rating: PG-13] The Twenty-third novel in the award-winning Tropical Frontier series, The Last Resort is, in addition, the Third novel in the Cow Hunters sub-series. The Civil War finds its way to the southern frontier, where young, impetuous Henry Hackensaw, eager to join up and serve, discovers he'd had no idea what war was.
During the Battle of Olustee, the ratio of Union casualties to troops involved made it the second bloodiest battle of the War for the Union, with 265 casualties per 1,000 troops. Soldiers on both sides were veterans of the great battles in the eastern and western theaters of war, but many remarked in letters and diaries that they had never undergone such terrible fighting.
The Battle of Olustee took place on February 20, 1864, near Lake City, Florida, pitting Union troops, including the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Colored Regiment, against seasoned Confederate troops. General Truman Seymour, commander of Union forces, made several, arguably serious blunders, thus handing the day to the South. The Confederate victory ensured that Florida beef and pork - essential to the war effort following Grant's victory at Vicksburg and the resulting Union blockade of the Mississippi, which obstructed access to Texas beef - continued to flow to the armies of the South.

[Rating: PG-13] It astounded Mary Addison to this day, the unwitting prejudices she once held for them, these who now called her Good Mother. She adored them; as they did her. Life can be like that, though, brimming with surprise, and revelation.