A lyrical exploration of the world’s most forbiddingly remote places, the supposedly uninhabited wildernesses of the world – and the humans who have always been there, by award-winning writer Cal Flyn. It is a book full of ideas, beauty and adventure, and one that asks provocative questions about how wilderness might be appreciated and preserved.
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.