Islands of Abandonment

THE SUNDAY TIMES’ BESTSELLER AND SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT BOOK OF THE YEARWINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT CONSERVATION AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE

Reviews

‘Extraordinary … Just when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain – not scenes where man has never trod, but places where he has been and gone … Dazzling’
Spectator
‘Exhilarating … A story of the extraordinary resilience of life in some of the most desolate, ravaged and polluted landscapes on earth’
Daily Telegraph
‘Fascinating and brain-energising. It is full of detail and colour that sends one googling, to look up pictures and find out more. It is also an optimistic book … I’ll cling to that bit of unfashionable hope’
The Times
‘Brave, thorough … The result is fascinating, eerie and strange … There is some thrilling writing here, a fine way with the telling detail, and a plea for radical revisioning of what we mean by “nature” and “wild”’
Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman
‘Consistently rewarding, eloquently provocative … a brave book, in more ways than one’
New Humanist
‘Scintillating … she writes beautifully … Flyn's research is meticulous, but what makes the book so extraordinary is the originality of her thought’
The Herald
‘A thoughtful, fascinating read’
Independent
‘Brilliant … Flyn paints vivid pictures … both clear and compelling’
Daily Telegraph, five stars
‘Filled with understanding and adventure … Written with a beautiful attention to detail and a generous and imaginative frame of mind. The wonderful and surprising thing is how much reassurance and sense of possibility comes out of it at every turn’
Adam Nicolson
‘Certainly a book of the year for me’ Sebastian Faulks
‘Cal Flyn takes us on a mercurial expedition into the strange lands of human surrender … Thoughtful, careful, fascinating, poignant, mysterious, surreal, compelling, pace pitch-perfect. I could go on … and on’
Keggie Carew, author of Dadland