Lisa Woollett at The Lost Kitchen

Lisa Woollett has spent her life combing beaches and mudlarking, collecting curious fragments of the past: from Roman tiles and Tudor thimbles, to Victorian buttons and plastic soldiers. Rag and Bone  also tells the story of Lisa’s family, a number of whom made their living from London's waste, and who made a similar journey downriver from the centre of the city to the sea.

A beautifully written but urgent mixture of social history, family memoir and nature writing, Rag and Bone is a book about what we can learn from what we've thrown away - and a call to think more about what we leave behind. In a series of walks from the Thames, out to the Kentish estuary and eventually to Cornwall, she traces the history of our rubbish and, through it, reveals the surprising story of our changing consumer culture.

From relics of Georgian empire-building and slave-trading, through Victorian London's barged-out refuse to 1980s fly-tipping and the pervasiveness of present-day plastics, Rag and Bone traces the story of our rubbish, and, through it, our history of consumption. Timely and beautifully written, Rag and Bone shows what we can learn from what we’ve thrown away and urges us to think more about what we leave behind.