The Savage Landscape

'Cal Flyn goes looking for answers to a troublesome question: What is wilderness? This is a book about searching in the best sense – full of ideas, beauty, doubt and adventures' ELIZABETH KOLBERT

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Islands of Abandonment, comes a new book about our relationship to the natural world.

This book takes us into the wild – deep into dark forests, to the top of mountains and into the heart of deserts. It addresses our deep yearnings to be awed and inspired by landscapes that remain beyond our reach and examines what nature gets up to in the absence of humans.

In 10 chapters, each loosely structured around a visit to some of the world’s wildest and most invigorating landscapes, the book asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might best be appreciated or preserved.

These locations have been chosen for their physical beauty, their perceived isolation, and the moral or emotional complexity of the human stories that can be found there. In this search for wilderness, we will meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds seeing off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.

Reviews

'Cal Flyn goes looking for answers to a troublesome question: What is wilderness? The Savage Landscape is a book about searching in the best sense – full of ideas, beauty, doubt and adventures'

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

'A profound and extraordinary book. It challenges our understanding of what wilderness is, about how it is and was measured, and questions long-held beliefs about nature and the unknown. Rich in detail, this book is a superb blend of geography, natural history, myth and religion, environmental science and cultural studies … The Savage Landscape is as vivid as the mesopelagic waters Cal Flyn so evocatively describes, as diverse as the flora and fauna of New Guinea … This book is one of the best books I have read in years’

Annie Worsley, author of Windswept

‘Cal Flyn examines our relationship with the wild places of the earth–and the meaning of wilderness itself–with an unflinching eye. The Savage Landscape is a beguiling book: by turns lyrical, learned, and provocative’

Ed Caesar, author of The Moth and the Mountain

‘Profound, exhilarating, and suffused with nuanced wit and insight. The Savage Landscape is essential and deeply rewarding reading for all who seek to understand the wild in our psyches and in the world. Flyn’s explorations are bold, sometimes terrifyingly so, and subtly attuned to paradox, fracture, and beauty. A must-read: put this book on the top of your list’

David George Haskell, author of How Flowers Made our World

‘A thrilling, tender, acute tour through the wildernesses of the world outside us and the far wilder worlds inside … Flyn is the perfect guide.’

Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast and The Edges of the World

‘Cal Flyn is one of the most exciting writers around … This book is at once thrilling adventure and bracing meditation.’

Pico Iyer, author of The Half Known Life