A deeply absorbing exploration of the ways we mark time. Fascinating and full of beauty

KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering

Most books about time teach you how to control your hours. This one teaches you how to inhabit them. Haynes shows how past generations read the day in flower petals, birdsong, and the slant of light – and what we lost when we stopped. The Fullness of Time is a quietly radical invitation to notice more, rush less and live deeper

DANIEL H. PINK, author of When

Haynes reminds us ancient practices such as waulking also marked a day, not in strict adherence to a mechanical timepiece, but in lived experience and in harmony with the elastic time of sunrise and sunset . . . In Haynes's gorgeous and immersive prose, a world before widespread mechanization unfolds. With each instructive and poetic chapter, she shows us how time used to be measured by birdsong and flower bud, the color of twilight and the wide wheel of stars . . . Brings back the poetry of time, reintroducing terms such as “gloaming” and “dimpse”, which mean the dimness of twilight . . . In a world of hurry and deadlines, smartphones and social media, The Fullness of Time offers a reminder to slow down, to look up, to notice. Through evocative descriptions . . . Haynes invites us to take part in the daily rhythms of our natural world

Brandy Schillace, Wall Street Journal

Over centuries, we have invited clocks ever deeper into our lives, but they are not the only keepers of time's rhythms. In her sensuous exploration of natural clocks, from flowers and the farmyard to the stars, Cathy Haynes presents a world that is much more than human and ticks just as regularly as our horological machines. This is a deeply attentive view over signs of the time; time – as Haynes chronicles so beautifully – in its fullness. A revelatory and utterly wonderful book

DAVID ROONEY, author of About Time

Immaculately researched and beautifully written, Cathy Haynes resurrects the forgotten alchemy of timekeeping

LARA MAIKLEM, author of Mudlarking

Fascinating and enchanting! Each chapter broadens and lifts our awareness, reminding us that we get to choose where we focus our attention between one dawn and the next

TRISTAN GOOLEY, author of The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs