Wombats are the hobbits of the Australian bush. With his usual brilliance James Woodford, bestselling author of The Wollemi Pine, explores the wombat’s bizarre evolutionary history and perilous future: a mere 65 northern hairy-nosed wombats remain in the wild.

But this book also tells the extraordinary story of Peter Nicholson, a schoolboy from Timbertop who in the 1960s learned more about the secret lives of these animals than anyone before him. This is popular science writing at its best: an irresistible subject in the hands of an irrepressible author.