From bestselling Landmarks author Robert Macfarlane and acclaimed artist and author Jackie Morris, a beautiful collection of poems and illustrations to help readers rediscover the magic of the natural world.
In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary -- widely used in schools around the world -- was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these lost words included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions -- the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual -- became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world.
Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a spell book that will conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to celebrate the wonder and importance of everyday nature. The Lost Words is that book -- a work that has already cast its extraordinary spell on hundreds of thousands of people and begun a grass-roots movement to re-wild childhood across Britain, Europe, and North America.
The follow-up to the internationally bestselling sensation The Lost Words, The Lost Spells is a beautiful collection of poems and illustrations that evokes the magic of the everyday natural world.
Since its publication in 2017, The Lost Words has enchanted readers with its poetry and illustrations of the natural world. Now, The Lost Spells, a book kindred in spirit and tone, continues to re-wild the lives of children and adults.
The Lost Spells evokes the wonder of everyday nature, conjuring up red foxes, birch trees, jackdaws, and more in poems and illustrations that flow between the pages and into readers' minds. Robert Macfarlane's spell-poems and Jackie Morris's watercolour illustrations are musical and magical: these are summoning spells, words of recollection, charms of protection. To read The Lost Spells is to see anew the natural world within our grasp and to be reminded of what happens when we allow it to slip away.
An enchanting and captivating novel about how our untold stories haunt us -- and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.
Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family's story. In her early twenties, Alice's life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.
Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice's unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.
Saving the planet is big business.
Realising this, savvy companies are hopping on the sustainability bandwagon. Some may have altruistic ends in mind, but most want to make a quick buck. As ethical spending and consumer options increase, greenwashing is not only proliferating--it's becoming harder to discern.
But how is someone at the supermarket supposed to decipher all this?
In The Great Greenwashing, John Pabon pulls no punches in arming consumers and business professionals with the tools they need to educate themselves, filter out the nonsense from the truth, and make a positive impact.
Ailton Krenak's ideas inspire, washing over you with every truth-telling sentence. Read this book. - Tanya Talaga, bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers
Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene.
From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society's flawed concept of humanity - that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please.
To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of dreaming that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way.
Winner of Australia's richest literary award, No Friend but the Mountains is Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani's account of his detainment on Australia's notorious Manus Island prison. Composed entirely by text message, this work represents the harrowing experience of stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world.
In 2013, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi.
It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait of five years of incarceration and exile. Winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature, No Friend but the Mountains is an extraordinary account -- one that is disturbingly representative of the experience of the many stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world.
Our government jailed his body, but his soul remained that of a free man. -- From the Foreword by Man Booker Prize-winning author Richard Flanagan
An indispensable guide to seeing and understanding our planet through the divisions we make, find, or feel.
Our world has innumerable boundaries. They range from the obvious--an ocean, or a mountain range--to subtle differences in language or climate. We cross boundaries all the time, sometimes without realizing it. They can be subjective: our perceptions of a boundary may not be shared by others. And yet they shape the way we engage with the world. Geographer Maxim Samson examines invisible lines, exploring the ways in which we divide this world--from meteorology and ecology to race and religion--and how they allow us to define insiders and outsiders, to identify places where particular attention and resources are especially urgent, to distinguish between two sides, two groups, two futures. From segregation along Detroit's infamous 8 Mile to herds of red deer that still refuse to cross the former Iron Curtain, the existence--or perceived existence--of dividing lines has manifold implications for people, wildlife, and places.
Vividly written and illustrated with maps, Invisible Lines is a compelling exploration of boundaries in all their consistency, and all their messiness too.
A taut and suspenseful domestic drama that explodes the comforting and constricting confines of marriage and early parenthood.
In a Florida almost claustrophobic with life, Georgie's marriage has stagnated. But there's no room to attend to it, as dangers small and large crowd in: teeth break, her son can't find his words, there's something in her husband's eye, termites swarm the neighbourhood, and she finds a dead boy in the burning woods.
And then--there's Jason.
As the repercussions of her discovery of the body, and her affair, come to land, Georgie digs deep, examining the undercurrents of her actions with curiosity, humour, and cutting emotional intelligence. Arms & Legs is a deliriously insightful excavation of love, desire, parenthood, and relationships at their best, and worst.
Longlist, 2023 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Book Awards
A radical interrogation of the ethics and future of birth by an expert legal scholar.
Every single one of us has been born from a person. So far. But that is about to change. For the first time, babies could be gestated and born from machines through Ex-vivo Uterine Environment Therapy, aka EVE. But such radical technology leaves us with complex legal, social, and ethical questions. What does this breakthrough in artificial human gestation mean for motherhood, womanhood, and parenthood? Countries and people that do not respect the autonomy of pregnant people may use these technologies to curtail choice further, advance eugenic ideas, or to deepen class and racial divides.
In this fascinating story of modern birth, Claire Horn takes us on a journey from the first orchid-like incubators in the 1880s to the cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs of today. As she explores the most challenging and pertinent questions of our age, Horn reflects on her own pregnancy. Could artificial wombs allow women to redistribute the work of gestating? How do we protect reproductive and abortion rights? And who exactly gets access to this technology, in our vastly unequal world?
From Robert Seethaler, the International Booker Prize finalist for A Whole Life and bestselling author of The Tobacconist, comes a tale of life and death and human connection, told through the voices of those who have passed on.
The Field is the oldest part of the cemetery in Paulstadt, where some of the small town's most outspoken residents can be found. From their graves, they tell stories. Some recall just a moment -- perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one they now realize changed the course of their life forever. Some remember all the people they've been with, or the only person they ever loved. This chorus of voices -- young, old, rich, poor -- builds a picture of a community, seen from below ground. The streets of the sleepy provincial town are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned, and died there.
The Field is a constellation of human lives -- each one different yet connected to countless others -- that shows how existence, for all its fleetingness, still has profound meaning.
An atmospheric and utterly compelling debut novel about a Jamaican immigrant living in postwar London, This Lovely City shows that new arrivals have always been the prime suspects -- but that even in the face of anger and fear, there is always hope.
London, 1950. With the war over and London still rebuilding, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England's call for labour. Arriving from Jamaica aboard the Empire Windrush, he's rented a tiny room in south London and fallen in love with the girl next door.
Playing in Soho's jazz clubs by night and pacing the streets as a postman by day, Lawrie has poured his heart into his new home -- and it's alive with possibility. Until one morning, while crossing a misty common, he makes a terrible discovery.
As the local community rallies, fingers of blame point at those who were recently welcomed with open arms. And before long, London's newest arrivals become the prime suspects in a tragedy that threatens to tear the city apart. Immersive, poignant, and utterly compelling, Louise Hare's debut examines the complexities of love and belonging, and teaches us that even in the face of anger and fear, there is always hope.
In an utterly unique approach to biography, On Love and Tyranny traces the life and work of the iconic German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, whose political philosophy and understandings of evil, totalitarianism, love, and exile prove essential amid the rise of the refugee crisis and authoritarian regimes around the world.
What can we learn from the iconic political thinker Hannah Arendt? Well, the short answer may be: to love the world so much that we think change is possible.
The life of Hannah Arendt spans a crucial chapter in the history of the Western world, a period that witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime and the crises of the Cold War, a time when our ideas about humanity and its value, its guilt and responsibility, were formulated. Arendt's thinking is intimately entwined with her life and the concrete experiences she drew from her encounters with evil, but also from love, exile, statelessness, and longing. This strikingly original work moves from political themes that wholly consume us today, such as the ways in which democracies can so easily become totalitarian states; to the deeply personal, in intimate recollections of Arendt's famous lovers and friends, including Heidegger, Benjamin, de Beauvoir, and Sartre; and to wider moral deconstructions of what it means to be human and what it means to be humane.
On Love and Tyranny brings to life a Hannah Arendt for our days, a timeless intellectual whose investigations into the nature of evil and of love are eerily and urgently relevant half a century later.
Roma meets A Gentleman in Moscow in this vivid portrait of the twentieth century, witnessed by one boy from his self-imposed refuge in Mexico City.
Galo has not left his home on Amsterdam Street, not since the day in 1938 when a shocking act of violence split his family apart. His hermitage is made easier by the peculiar design of the street. It is shaped like an ellipse -- if you walk it, you will find yourself returning to the same place again and again.
Playing host to Jewish refugees, Spanish exiles, and Latin American revolutionaries, his home becomes the school at which Galo learns about a world he never sees, and the ideals and terrors that shape history. He begins to realize that Amsterdam Street, the site of endless returns, may be the true centre of the world. Appointing himself the street's guardian, Galo witnesses the decades pass, knowing that everyone who walks away must one day come back.
A novel of rare humanity and grace, The Guardian of Amsterdam Street is a stunning portrait of a neighbourhood where the whole of the twentieth century comes alive and a moving inquiry into how we shape the world, and how it transforms us in turn.
A timely collection of new and previously published work by one of New Zealand's most acclaimed poets, How to Be Happy Though Human introduces Kate Camp's eclectic and musical poetry to international audiences for the first time.
How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems is Kate Camp's seventh book of poetry and the first to be published outside New Zealand. Incorporating a grouping of new, previously unpublished work and a selection of important poems from her six earlier collections, this volume introduces North American readers to poetry that has been described by critics as fearless, mesmerizing, and containing a surprising radicalism and power.
Camp's work is recognized for its wide-ranging and eclectic subject matter, its technical control, and its musicality, with pop culture, high culture, the domestic confessional, close observation, and found language featured as recurring elements of style.
A timely retrospective that represents a new chapter in Camp's career, How to Be Happy Though Human promises to gain a wide readership for this thoughtful, engaging, and popular writer.