4.0
The Wild Places
ByPublisher Description
From The New York Times bestselling author of Is A River Alive and Underland, an "eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we're laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth's surface." --Bill McKibben
Winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and a finalist for the Orion Book Award
Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance.
Winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and a finalist for the Orion Book Award
Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Wild Places Reviews
4.0
“Having read some other books by McFarlane I would say that this one feels a little over-edited, bits cut out which I would have liked to have read. As a stand alone book it is still magical and makes me want to go out in to the wild”
“I’ve long been a fan of Macfarlane’s work, its always lyrical, informative, deeply personal. He has a gift for folding language and landscape together, drawing meaning from stone, sea, and silence. His writing doesn’t just describe the world, it slows it down, opens it up, by providing deep research, with personal accounts from people and places.
Since moving from Australia to the UK, I’ve often struggled with the idea of wildness. There’s plenty of green here, rolling fields, parks, walking trails that promise “escape.” But not much that feels truly wild. Everywhere seems touched by human, the straightened rivers, the fences and footpaths, the soft hum of civilisation that never quite fades. Even in beauty, there’s can be a sense of control, people always one turn around.
In The Wild Places, Macfarlane goes looking for what remains, those scraps and seams of land that still hold a sense of untamed life. He climbs mountains, sleeps under stars, follows coastlines and holloways. But as the book unfolds, his definition of wildness shifts. The wilderness isn’t just in remote corners of the map, it’s in the cracks and edges, in the moss reclaiming a stone wall, the fox darting through a back garden, the weather shifting over a hill.
That idea really landed with me. The other day I saw a kingfisher along the canal near my house, a flash of blue in a very urban stretch of water. It reminded me that wildness still insists on being seen, even here, even now. This was the case during my covid walks, where you literally saw the plants change daily.
This book made me want to climb a tree again, something I haven’t done in years. As a kid, it was one of my favourite things. The view from up there changes everything. Watch this space.
The Wild Places is an invitation to pause, to pay attention. It’s a reminder that the wild isn’t gone, it’s just waiting for us to look differently.”
About Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prizewinning books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland . He has contributed to Harper’s, Granta, The New Yorker, the Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Other books by Robert Macfarlane
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