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Your next favorite book
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by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris
The follow-up to the internationally bestselling sensation The Lost Words, The Lost Spells is a beautiful collection of poems and illustrations that evokes the magic of the everyday natural world.
Since its publication in 2017, The Lost Words has enchanted readers with its poetry and illustrations of the natural world. Now, The Lost Spells, a book kindred in spirit and tone, continues to re-wild the lives of children and adults.
The Lost Spells evokes the wonder of everyday nature, conjuring up red foxes, birch trees, jackdaws, and more in poems and illustrations that flow between the pages and into readers' minds. Robert Macfarlane's spell-poems and Jackie Morris's water colour illustrations are musical and magical: these are summoning spells, words of recollection, charms of protection. To read The Lost Spells is to see anew the natural world within our grasp and to be reminded of what happens when we allow it to slip away.
"This unusually beautiful book brings to readers the magic and wonder of nature … Breathtakingly magical." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Macfarlane's lyrics … ring with consonance ("Thrift thrives where most life fails, falls,/ is cast adrift") and wordplay ("Woodpecker, tree-wrecker") … Morris's fluid artwork renders the elegant tilt of a fox's snout, birds' calligraphic flight patterns, and the eyelike whorls of silver birch bark … One to treasure." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Through deeply humane poems paired with warm illustrations, MacFarlane and Morris invited readers into the space where the enchanting natural world meets the expansive imagination ... Crafted with the same tenderness as its sibling." ―Shelf Awareness
This information about The Lost Spells 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's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic-novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Jackie Morris has written or illustrated over seventy books, including the beloved children's classics Tell Me a Dragon and East of the Sun, West of the Moon and a volume of modern folklore for readers of all ages, Wild Folk, co-created with Tamsin Abbott, as well as introducing and illustrating Barbara Newhall Follett's gem of wild literature, The House Without Windows. She is the internationally bestselling and award-winning co-creator of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, two books which have captured the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers of all ages. In 2018 she won the Kate Greenaway Medal and the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year for The Lost Words. Her artwork is held by public art collections in the UK and USA and has been published in the New Statesman, Independent and Guardian among other venues. She tours and performs with the Spell Songs ensemble around the UK, and is a Fellow of Herefordshire Art College.
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