WINNER OF THE ORION BOOK AWARD
Part travelogue, part manifesto for wildness as an essential character of life, Wild is a one-of-a-kind book from a one-of-a-kind author
'Undefinable, untameable, profound and extraordinary' Observer
'A masterpiece' Maria Popova
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'I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end - a strangely sweet result - I came back to a wild home.'
Wild describes an extraordinary odyssey, courageous and sometimes dangerous. It is by turns funny, touching and harrowing, and offers a poetic consideration of the tender connection between human society and wildlands.
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'Easily the best travel book that I have read in the last ten years' Guardian
'Wild is likenothing else I've ever read: thrilling, troubling, frightening, exhilarating. This is a truly necessary book, and we are all lucky that the subject found a writer worthy of it' Philip Pullman
'Passionate, rigorous and utterly honest, Griffiths's remarkable book is written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject' Robert Macfarlane
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141006444
Number of pages: 480
Weight: 336 g
Dimensions: 198 x 130 x 28 mm
Wild is like nothing else I've ever read: thrilling, troubling, frightening, exhilarating. Jay Griffiths' courage and energy are formidable, but so is her sheer intelligence and literary flair - Phillip Pullman
Reality is such that both language and imagination have to exaggerate in order to confront it truly. Living with such exaggeration you need a very good head for heights and a lot of bravery. In this book Jay Griffiths has both. If bravery itself could write (by definition it can't), it would write, I believe, like she does - John Berger
A vivifying read in its entirety . . . both an act of revolt (against the erasure of the wild, against the domestication of the soul) and an act of reverence (for the irrepressible in nature, for landscape as a form of knowledge, for life on Earth, as improbable and staggering as love.) . . . Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being . . . What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against our self-expatriation from our own nature - Maria Popova, The Marginalian
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