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21st-Century Yokel

Tom Cox

Book cover: 21st-Century Yokel

Thick with owls and badgers, oak trees and wood piles, scarecrows and ghosts, and Tom Cox’s loud and excitable dad, this book is full of the folklore of several counties the ancient kind and the everyday variety as well as wild places, mystical spots and curious objects. Emerging from this focus on the detail are themes that are broader and bigger and more important than ever.

Tom’s writing treads a new path, one that has a lot in common with a rambling country walk; it’s bewitched by fresh air and big skies, intrepid in minor ways, haunted by weather and old stories and the spooky edges of the outdoors, restless and prone to a few detours, but it always reaches its destination in the end.

Paperback

ISBN: 9781800755994

Published: October 9, 2025

Ebook

ISBN: 9781800756007

Published: June 19, 2025

Book cover: 21st-Century Yokel

Category:
Non-fiction

Reviews for 21st-Century Yokel

‘A rich, strange, oddly glorious brew’ – Guardian

‘[An] entertaining walk through English folklore … he keeps us with him for the whole journey’ – Observer

‘Like a British David Sedaris dedicated to a rural way of life, Tom Cox crafts funny and poignant stories out of observations and interactions – except his observations are of trees and his interactions are with squirrels’ – A.V. Club

Author

Tom Cox

Author image not available for Tom Cox

Tom Cox was born in Nottinghamshire in 1975 and now lives in Devon. His fifteen books include Villager, 1983, the Sunday Times top ten bestseller The Good, The Bad And The Furry, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted 21st-Century Yokel and Help The Witch, which won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing award. You can subscribe to his Substack page at tomcox.substack.com

Author image not available for Tom Cox