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3.5 

Ghostways

By Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood &
Ghostways by Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A hauntingly beautiful diptych of works inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s travels with celebrated collaborators to two eerie corners of England.

In Holloway, "a perfect miniature prose-poem" (William Dalrymple), Macfarlane, artist Stanley Donwood, and writer Dan Richards travel to Dorset, near the south coast of England, to explore a famed "hollowed way"—a path used by walkers and riders for so many centuries that it has become worn far down into the soft golden bedrock of the region.

In Ness, "a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age" (Max Porter), Macfarlane and Donwood create a modern myth about Orford Ness, the ten-mile-long shingle spit that lies off the coast of East Anglia, which the British government used for decades to conduct secret weapons tests.

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Ghostways Reviews

3.5
“Ness: 5 stars Holloways: 4.25 stars I am a big fan of ecocriticism so this was definitely up my alley. I preferred Ness over Holloways (partial to personification & chapels) but found both to be lovely reads. Macfarlane perfectly captured the haunted historical feeling of England in both atmosphere and physical appearances. The cycles of decay and life (& the destructive qualities of men) in both collections were beautifully depicted, and I quite enjoyed the fairytale-esque storytelling narrative in Ness. I had first come across Ghostways in a cute independent bookstore in North Yorkshire, England but didn't end up picking it up, was trying to not buy a book (haha). Very glad to have found it back home at my local library. An excellent October read for those who love nature and don't mind the feeling of ghosts walking the same paths among the trees as you do. "Time to them is not deep, not deep at all, for time is only ever overlapping tumbling versions of the now." "Down in the dusk of the holloway, the landscape's pasts felt excitingly alive & coexistent, as if history had pleated back on itself, bringing discontinuous moments into contact & creating correspondences that survived a territorial imperative to concealment, escape, & encounter."”
“Don't have the rights words for the feelings this gave me but I'll try; it felt like myth, i felt awe, wonder, slightly unsettled, like it's as old as time, like i was meant to discover this book half decayed and covered in moss in the woods of England”

About Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane’s best-selling books include Underland, The Old Ways, and Mountains of the Mind. With the artist Jackie Morris he is the coauthor of The Lost Words, The Lost Spells, and The Book of Birds. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence and is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood is a graphic designer and artist who has worked with the band Radiohead, producing artwork for their albums and promotional materials. His books include Bad Island, Catacombs of Terror!, Slowly Downward, Small Thoughts, and There Will Be No Quiet. He lives in London.

Dan Richards

Dan Richards is author of several books including The Beechwood Airship Interviews and Climbing Days. Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth was published by Canongate in 2019. He writes for various papers and magazines including The Guardian, Economist, and Monocle, and lives in Edinburgh.

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