Fen, Bog and Swamp: from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize - Hardcover

Proulx, Annie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 000853439X ISBN 13: 9780008534394

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2022

Synopsis

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

‘A subject that could not be more important. A compact classic!’ Bill McKibben

‘I learned something new – and found something amazing – on every page’ Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx – whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth – comes an urgent and riveting history of wetlands, their ecological role and how the loss of them threatens the planet.

Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources, and in four illuminating parts Proulx documents the emergence of their systemic destruction in the pursuit of profit and the consequent release of their stored carbon. Wide-ranging and idiosyncratic, Proulx’s explanation of wetlands takes readers to the fens of sixteenth-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire and America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and introduces the nineteenth-century explorers who launched the ravaging of the Amazon rainforest.

Proulx was born in the 1930s, a time, as she says, when ‘in the ever-continuing name of progress, Western countries busily raped their own and other countries of minerals, timber, fish and wildlife.’ Fen, Bog & Swamp is both a revelatory history and an urgent plea for wetland reclamation from a writer whose passionate devotion to observing and preserving the environment is on glorious display.

‘Magnificent, bringing to life hitherto overlooked habitats’ Guardian

‘Proulx's sparkling book will open your eyes to humanity's reckless trashing of wetlands’ Telegraph

‘A haunting tribute … Proulx’s poetic description of these places, and peat itself, is a pleasure to read’ Financial Times

About this title

About the Author

Annie Proulx is the author of nine books, including the novel The Shipping News, Barkskins and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in New Hampshire.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 000853439X
• ISBN 13: 9780008534394
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208