A beautiful, lyrical exploration of the places where nature is flourishing in our absence "[Flyn] captures the dread, sadness, and wonder of beholding the results of humanity's destructive impulse, and she arrives at a new appreciation of life, 'all the stranger and more valuable for its resilence.'" --The New Yorker Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl. A lush forest supports thousands of species that are extinct or endangered everywhere else on earth in the Korean peninsula's narrow DMZ. Cal Flyn, an investigative journalist, exceptional nature writer, and promising new literary voice visits the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth that due to war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, have been abandoned by humans. What she finds every time is an "island" of teeming new life: nature has rushed in to fill the void faster and more thoroughly than even the most hopeful projections of scientists. Islands of Abandonment is a tour through these new ecosystems, in all their glory, as sites of unexpected environmental significance, where the natural world has reasserted its wild power and promise. And while it doesn't let us off the hook for addressing environmental degradation and climate change, it is a case that hope is far from lost, and it is ultimately a story of redemption: the most polluted spots on Earth can be rehabilitated through ecological processes and, in fact, they already are.

Cal Flyn was very proud when she discovered that her ancestor, Angus McMillan, had been a pioneer of colonial Australia. However, when she dug deeper, she began to question her pride. McMillan had not only cut tracks through the bush, but played a dark role in Australia's bloody history. In 1837 Angus McMillan left the Scottish Highlands for the other side of the world. Cutting paths through the Australian frontier, he became a feted pioneer, to be forever mythologised in status and landmarks. He was also Cal Flyn's great-great-great-uncle. Inspired by his fame, Flyn followed in his footsteps to Australia, where she would face horrifying family secrets. Blending memoir, history and travel,Thicker Than Water' evokes the startlingly beautiful wilderness of the Highlands, the desolate bush of Victoria and the reverberations on one from the other. A tale of blood and bloodlines, it is a powerful, personal journey into dark family history, grief and guilt.

Living with her father in a nature preserve in Portland, Oregon, thirteen-year-old Caroline only merges with the civilized world once a week when they go into the city, but an encounter with a backcountry jogger derails their entire existence.

A penetrating take on how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence

A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag. Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Brian Dillon’s style incorporates diverse features of the essay. By turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.

SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR In Island Dreams, Gavin Francis combines stories of his own travels with psychology, philosophy and myth, shedding new light on the importance of islands and isolation in our collective consciousness. Francis draws on thirty years of island adventures from the Faroe Islands to the Aegean, from the Galapagos to the Andaman Islands. He contrasts these quests for freedom with the demands for commitment required as a doctor, community member and parent. Island Dreams riffs on the twin poles of rest and motion, independence and attachment, never more relevant than in today’s ever-connected world.

A captivating meditation on the power of the sentence by the author of Essayism, a 2018 New Yorker book of the year. In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called “a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin,” has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, turning his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—this new book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.