So what’s the relevance to The Seed Thief? Besides the fact that, without bees, there pretty much wouldn’t be seeds to write about (or to star in book titles)? Well, there is actually a fair amount of riffing on bees in the story. Maddy (the protagonist and narrator) is a botanist, and one of her favourite texts (and mine) is Michael Pollan’s ‘The Botany of Desire’.