The Wild Places - Hardcover

Robert Macfarlane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1862079412 ISBN 13: 9781862079410

Publisher: Granta Books, 2007

Synopsis

The Wild Places is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space. Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places. Certain birds, animals, trees and objects snow-hares, falcons, beeches, crows, suns, white stones recur, and as it progresses this densely patterned book begins to bind tighter and tighter. At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history, it is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

About this title

Review:

"... a descriptive writer of breathtaking power" -- The Sunday Times

"Beautiful and inspiring ... a deeply stirring book" -- Independent

"Nature is a passion that Robert Macfarlane puts beautifully into words ... one of the finest nature writers in Britain" -- Scotsman

"The Wild Places is a book that inhales the zeitgeist, as well as the fresh air of open country" -- Guardian

`Macfarlane's style, spare and elegant, combines with an acute eye to produce some wonderful writing'
-- TLS, Patrick Curry

`Such lovely honeyed prose. Macfarlane is delightful literary company, polite, earnest, erudite and wide-ranging in his interests.'
-- LRB, Kathleen Jamie

About the Author:

Robert Macfarlane s Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), won the Guardian First Book Award, The Somerset Maugham Award, and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was filmed by the BBC. It was also short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize for the Literature of Place, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountaineering Literature, the Banff Mountain Literature Award, and long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. It was acclaimed as one of the two most important books written around the experience of mountains in the past fifty years . Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He lives in Cambridge with his family.

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1862079412
• ISBN 13: 9781862079410
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 352