Wild: An Elemental Journey

Description

'Easily the best, most rewarding travel book that I have read in the last decade' Guardian '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 anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. 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, to wildernesses of earth and ice, water and fire. It is by turns funny, touching and harrowing, and offers a poetic consideration of the tender connection between human society and wild lands. Wild won the inaugural Orion Book Award for 2007 and was shortlisted for the Orwell prize and for the World Book Day award.

Jay Griffiths was born in Manchester in 1965. She is the author of Pip Pip, Wild, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon and Kith. She won the Orion Book Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA. She has also been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the World Book Day award. Jay is a contributor to various publications and platforms including the Guardian, London Review of Books and the Radiolab podcast. Her memoir Tristimania will be published by Hamish Hamilton in May 2016.

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 * Philip 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 *