Gifts of Gravity and Light

‘A generous book, offering the small stories – of childhood, family, place, of growth and falling away and regrowth – that enable the big connections with the flow of the world.’ – Mark Goldthorpe, Climate Cultures

‘A meander through the seasons that is filled with lyrical gifts and new ways of seeing the world. This is new nature writing – as diverse, original and ceaselessly surprising as the wild world it celebrates.’ Patrick Barkham, Natural History correspondent for The Guardian and author of Islander, Badgerlands, The Butterfly Isles and Wild Child: Coming Home to Nature.

‘A wonderfully diverse collection of poetry and long-form prose, celebrating the four seasons of the year in a fresh and ultimately life-affirming way.’ Stephen Moss

‘These essays urgently reimagine what nature writing can be-and whose stories belong in that canon. Gifts of Gravity and Light is generous, unsentimental, and bursting with talented voices that will shape this genre for decades to come.’ Jessica J. Lee, author of Two Trees Make a Forest and Turning, and editor of The Willowherb Review

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‘I learned something new from each enjoyable essay and by the end realised that nature is integral to how we live on this planet, not a subsidiary to life, but at the heart of it.’ – Bernardine Evaristo

The changing seasons of the year are an endless source of strangeness and wonder. Gifts of Gravity and Light invites you to experience Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter through fourteen different voices. Greet the arrival of spring in East London with a Cambodian new year’s dance; watch sea otters at play in the summer sun; gather armfuls of hops in a Romany song to the autumn; yield to the icy stillness of winter in the Cairngorms or pine for ‘sun drunk’ days of a Jamaican childhood.

With a foreword by Bernardine Evaristo and contributions from Jackie Kay, Kaliane Bradley, Pippa Marland, Testament, Michael Malay, Tishani Doshi, Jay Griffiths, Luke Turner, Anita Roy, Raine Geoghegan, Zakiya McKenzie, Alys Fowler, Amanda Thomson and Simon Armitage, this almanac reflects not only the diversity of the writers featured, but the endlessly changing natural world itself.