The Savage Landscape

'This is a book about searching in the best sense – full of ideas, beauty, doubt and adventures' ELIZABETH KOLBERT

'Fascinating and masterfully written' ALICE WINN

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.

'A book that takes you into the wild and ignites the imagination. Compelling and thought provoking, Flyn’s journey into the heart of the matter challenges us to rethink the relationship between human culture and nature' SUE STUART SMITH

'The Savage Landscape enthralled me—leading me spellbound through our encounters with and imaginings of wilderness and its many faces. In Flyn’s hands, a deeply researched history is given vibrant, propulsive life' JESSICA J LEE

About the author

Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. She writes creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and long-form journalism.

Her first book, Thicker Than Water, about frontier violence in colonial Australia, was a Times book of the year. Her second book, Islands of Abandonment — about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places — has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards including the Wainwright Prize, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction.

Cal’s journalistic writing has been published in Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Economist, and others. Cal was previously writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library and at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland. She was made a MacDowell fellow in 2019, and in 2022 was announced the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.