I had no idea what the hidden city of the title was until I picked up the book, and it's Aberdeen, a place I have never been, and of which my sum total of knowledge was that it was very far north in Scotland, full of granite, and it rained a lot there. (There's a joke of doubtful truth, here in New Zealand, that when the Scots first settled here they chose Nelson, but the weather was too nice there so they went to Dunedin instead. I don't know where I heard that one, but heard it I have.) Woolfson's diary tracks the changes through the year, and it starts and ends in winter. The pages are full of snow, and rain, and her constant desire to see the aurora borealis, a desire which never eventuates though freezing winds are all too common, and not, I think, much compensation.

Most of the focus, though, is given to the creatures that live in her house and garden, the majority of which are birds. There's not a lot of what you'd call fancy wildlife here. Woolfson seems to have a particular predilection for the common and the disdained; she focuses on creatures like pigeons, sparrows, and rats, wondering how far she should go to make room for them in her house. A little mouse who wants to spend the winter inside and steals the odd tiny bit of food from her birds, fine. The rats that make a home under the house are less fine, but the guilt she feels in having them poisoned is constant. There's a strong focus here on learning to value common creatures for themselves, and the moral consequences of choosing to cause them harm. Why are her Aberdeen neighbours so vicious towards the grey squirrel, for example, and so welcoming to the red? (Though it's a late welcoming, given the national history of slaughter towards those same red squirrels.) It's a very thoughtful book, anyway, and if I do find it a tiny bit slow in places, I still really enjoyed it. And I want to visit Aberdeen now, so there's that.