Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2016
352 pages
Genre: Travel & Adventure
Publication Information
From the northern wilds of Greenland and Scotland to the far away reaches of Scandinavia and Siberia, a moving meditation on the allure of travel and the meaning of home.
The sixtieth parallel marks a borderland between the northern and southern worlds. Wrapping itself around the lower reaches of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, it crosses the tip of Greenland and the southern coast of Alaska, and slices the great expanses of Russia and Canada in half. The parallel also passes through Shetland, where Malachy Tallack has spent most of his life.
In Sixty Degrees North, Tallack travels westward, exploring the landscapes of the parallel and the ways that people have interacted with those landscapes, highlighting themes of wildness and community, isolation and engagement, exile and memory.
An intimate journey of the heart and mind, Sixty Degrees North begins with the author's loss of his father and his own troubled relationship with Shetland, and concludes with an embrace of the place he calls home.
"Starred Review. An enthralling meditation on place." - Kirkus
"Readers interested in the regions and peoples around the 60th parallel will be drawn to this work." - Library Journal
"A subtle, thoughtful study of life on the sixtieth parallel. Highly enjoyable." - The Financial Times (UK)
"Tallack is one of a burgeoning group of young travel writers who have reinvigorated the genre with elements of psychogeography: the study of how places make us feel." - The Guardian (UK)
"It is a brave book...and a beautiful book." - Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
"Malachy Tallack is the real deal, a writer given over to pure curiosity, honest witness and that most precious of gifts, an unselfconscious sense of wonder. Not just a vibrant new voice, but a wise, questioning and highly sophisticated talent." - John Burnside, author of Waking Up in Toytown: A Memoir
"Elegant, meditative, and wry. Tallack takes the reader on some fascinating excursions." - Gavin Francis, author of True North: Travels in Arctic Europe
This information about Sixty Degrees North was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Malachy Tallack has written for the New Statesman,The Guardian, the Scottish Review of Books and many other publications. He won a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2014 and the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015. As a singer-songwriter, he has released four albums and an EP, and performed in venues across the United Kingdom. He is editor of the online magazine The Island Review and co-editor of Fair Isle: Through the Seasons. He is from Shetland and currently lives in Glasgow.
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