Dispersals
On Plants, Borders and Belonging. A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worlds
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
HIGHLY COMMENDED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASLE-UKI BOOK PRIZE 2025
LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2025
‘An invigorating cross-pollination of memoir and natural history, both beautifully phrased and delicately structured – this book deserves your time and attention’ Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion.
In Dispersals, she examines the echoes and counterpoints in the migration of plants and people – and the language we use to describe them. Combining memoir, history and scientific research, Lee questions how both plants and people come to belong – or not – and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.
‘Contemplative, elegant’ New Statesman
'At once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life’ Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these genre-defying essays, Lee (Two Trees Make a Forest), a creative writing instructor at the University of Cambridge, discusses the peregrinations of plant species in relation to her family's migrations. Born to a Welsh father and Taiwanese mother while both lived in Canada in the 1970s, Lee contends that the contrasting teatime rituals of her maternal and paternal grandparents speak to the historical rifts between China and Britain over the tea plant. She chronicles how Britain supplied China with opium from its Indian colonies in exchange for tea, which was subject to import tariffs that funded Britain's colonial enterprise. Reflecting on the pine species she's encountered while living in Canada, England, and Germany, Lee describes the trees "as migrants making do" for their resilience, adaptability, and easily spread seeds. Elsewhere, she traces the domestication of soybeans in connection with her grandmother's family's soy sauce business and how humanity's interventions in the natural world make it difficult to determine whether species are invasive or native. Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline (in the poignant final essay addressed to her newborn child, Lee writes, "Above us the hawthorn leafs out against a pale blue sky. You watch the play of light and shadow it creates, cooing each time you round your lips and exhale"). This deserves a wide audience.
