Robert Macfarlane

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE AND BOOKPAGEFiguring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries--beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biolog...

"How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? Come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we've never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it's also critical to our species's evolutionary success. In From Here to There M...

Its hooves were supposedly a cure for epilepsy, it is the mascot of the clothing company Abercrombie and Fitch, and its meat is a delicacy. The moose is a fascinating but elusive animal of the north, and its little-known natural history is the focus of Kevin Jackson’s engaging new book. Moose explains the animal's behaviour, evolution and diet, and...

In recent years the term "psychogeography" has been used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas from ley lines and the occult, to urban walking and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? This book examines the origins of psychogeography in the Paris of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and...

Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward h...

Enter ancient lands of wind and waves where the planet's greatest flyers battle for survival.As the only creatures at home on land, at sea, and in the air, seabirds have evolved to thrive in the most demanding environment on Earth.In The Seabird's Cry, Adam Nicolson travels ocean paths, fusing traditional knowledge with astonishing facts science ha...

Every year, millions of geese embark on a three-thousand-mile migration from their winter quarters in the southern United States to their breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic. Intrigued by what he’d read about the birds’ amazing annual journey, and desperate to emerge from a period of illness, William Fiennes decided to go with them.The story of...

Barry Lopez's National Book Award-winning classic study of the Far North is widely considered his masterpiece.Lopez offers a thorough examination of this obscure world-its terrain, its wildlife, its history of Eskimo natives and intrepid explorers who have arrived on their icy shores. But what turns this marvelous work of natural history into a bre...

A galvanizing and powerful debut, Mill Town is an American story, a human predicament, and a moral wake-up call that asks: what are we willing to tolerate and whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper ...

Following in the successful nature-writing style of Robert MacFarlane and Gillian Clarke, Distance and Memory is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place—a house in northern Aber...

A journey into the hidden world of fungi.When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet...