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Published Aug 2016
448 pages
Genre: Travel & Adventure
Publication Information
From Robert Macfarlane, the acclaimed author of The Old Ways - a celebration of the language of landscape and the power of words to shape our sense of place.
For years now, the British writer Robert Macfarlane has been collecting place-words: terms for aspects of landscape, nature, and weather, drawn from dozens of languages and dialects of the British Isles.
In this, his fifth book, Macfarlane brilliantly explores the linguistic and literary terrain of the British archipelago, from the Shetlands to Cornwall and from Cumbria to Suffolk, offering themed glossaries of hundreds of these rare, deeply local, poetical terms, organized by such geographical terrains as flatlands, uplands, waterlands, coastlands, woodlands, and underlands. Interspersed with this archive of place words are biographical essays in which Macfarlane writes of his favorite authors who have paid close attention to the natural world and who embody in their own work the huge richness of place language - from Barry Lopez and John Muir to Nan Shepard, J. A. Baker, and Roger Deakin.
Landmarks is a book about the power of language and how it can become a way to know and love landscape, from a writer acclaimed for his own precision of utterance and distinctive, lyrical voice.
"Starred Review. Lucent, lyrical prose evokes Macfarlane's aesthetic, ethical, and powerfully tactile response to nature's enchantments." - Kirkus
"Astonishing and revelatory." - The Spectator (UK)
"This joyous meditation on land and language is a love letter to the British Isles." - The Guardian (UK)
"Landmarks is a kind of manual of how people in love with place and language are created by landscape, and, in turn, create their art." - The Telegraph (UK)
"Thoughtful and lyrical writing ... It's gorgeous." - Independent on Sunday (UK)
"Enormously pleasurable, deeply moving ... Landmarks is both a bid to save our rich hoard of landscape language, and a blow struck for the power of a deep creative relationship to place." - Financial Times (UK)
This information about Landmarks 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.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of best-selling, prize-winning books about nature, place, and people, including Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and (with Jackie Morris) The Lost Words. In 2017 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Cambridge University.
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