‘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