The Book of Birds is a twist on classic field guides from the creators of bestseller The Lost Words

The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, an illustrated guide to Britain’s threatened bird species, has been named as the Wainwright prize book of the year.

Meanwhile, the prize’s children’s book of the year award went to Otherlands: An Illustrated Journey Through Earth’s Lost Worlds by Thomas Halliday, illustrated by Gavin Scott.

(Sub Pop)
The doomy duo strip back their sound to tectonic guitars and feedback, conjuring an immersive, strangely euphoric listening experience recorded in the wilds of Washington

Nearly seven years on from Sunn O)))’s last two albums, the Steve Albini-produced companion pieces Life Metal and Pyroclasts, the drone metal pioneers’ 10th album presents itself as a return to basics. Eponymously titled and released on Sub Pop – the label that put out drone metal’s ur-text, Earth’s 1993 debut Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version – it strips away Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s penchant for collaboration (Scott Walker, Merzbow) and much of the expanded musical palette that came with it. No church organ, no dulcimer, no vocals, no radical reassembly of their material courtesy of Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton: closer Glory Black features a brief burst of piano, and there are apparently synthesisers somewhere in the mix, but for the most part, the album seems to deal almost exclusively in heavily distorted down-tuned guitars and feedback, the core of Sunn O)))’s sound since they formed in 1998.

But clearly the notion of a back-to-basics album should not be confused with that of an understated one. It’s not really an adjective that fits something that lasts the best part of 90 minutes, comes wrapped in a sleeve featuring two Mark Rothko paintings – by permission of the painter’s estate – and features somewhere between 130 and 180 tracks of guitar per song. (The latter comes thanks to a studio procedure that involved producer Brad Wood miking up not just the duo’s amplifiers but each amplifier’s individual speakers, and setting up what he called “the world’s largest stereo array of room mics” to capture ambient textures.) It also comes complete with sleeve notes from nature writer Robert Macfarlane, which variously quote the Greek stoic Epictetus, Walter Benjamin, 19th-century naturalist John Muir, author Patrick White and indigenous American environmentalist Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Sinkholes, storm drains, manmade labs miles underground … this documentary, based on Robert Macfarlane’s book, burrows deep into some of humanity’s great unknowns

There are some arresting questions and potent images in Rob Petit’s ruminative essay-documentary Underland, based on Robert Macfarlane’s bestselling book of the same name about the spaces under the Earth’s surface and what they tell us – or withhold from us – about human existence and the Anthropocene.

Mexican archaeologist Fátima Tec Pool descends into a cenote, a freshwater sinkhole, on the Yucatan peninsula, the entry point to a mysterious subterranean zone; these were revered by the Maya people as Xibalba, the underworld, and once upon a time explored by them using just firelight. Meanwhile, theoretical physicist Mariangela Lisanti studies dark matter in a special ultra-clean facility constructed miles below the Earth’s surface in Canada, and urban explorer Bradley Garrett roams the scary and dark storm-drain tunnels below Las Vegas and discovers evidence that people live there; poor people driven underground.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from a Booker-winning tale of one man’s life to a gossipy account of the golden age of magazines

Folk duo Pound & Stevens have transformed, and added to, Holst’s The Planets Suite and tour the new work this week with Britten Sinfonia. Will Pound explains why playing by ear is his greatest strength

I’m a harmonica and accordion player and one half of folk-classical duo Stevens & Pound. As a multi-instrumentalist I am rooted in a folk tradition that is oral, aural and communal. Music and song are passed down by ear, either through recordings or – more fun – traditional music sessions. Here, players and singers get together to share, swap and play tunes, drawing from a repertoire that is always evolving. While collections of tunes are certainly notated, their scores act as a skeleton – providing the basic architecture of pitch and rhythm but rarely offering explicit guidance on how the music should be played.

Delia Stevens and I are about to head out on tour, performing with the Britten Sinfonia and Robert Macfarlane in a new work called The Silent Planet, a recomposition of Holst’s Planets suite. It’s the culmination of 18 months of rehearsals and revisions, and the score for this 60-minute work, orchestrated by Ian Gardiner, totals 165 pages and includes Earth, an entirely new composition.

Colm Tóibín, Robert Macfarlane, Elif Shafak, Michael Rosen and more share the novels, poetry and memoirs that make the perfect gift

I love giving books as presents. I rarely give anything else. I strongly approve of the Icelandic tradition of the Jólabókaflóðið (Yule book flood), whereby books are given (and, crucially, read) on Christmas Eve. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the one I’ve given more often than any other; so much so that I keep a stack of four or five to hand, ready to give at Christmas or any other time of the year. It’s a slender masterpiece – a meditation on Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the Cairngorm mountains, which was written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It’s “about the Cairngorms” in the sense that Mrs Dalloway is “about London”; which is to say, it is both intensely engaged with its specific setting, and gyring outwards to vaster questions of knowledge, existence and – a word Shepherd uses sparingly but tellingly – love.