‘An essential waybook for a bewildered world’ NANCY CAMPBELL, author of Thunderstone and Fifty Words for Snow
‘A powerful and evocative exploration of disaster and collapse, resilience and renewal’ SHAFIK MEGHJI, author of Small Earthquakes
This is not a book about the end of the world – it’s about the start of a new one.
Melting glaciers. Crumbling coasts. Vanishing seas. The feeling that our world is coming to an end has led to a rise in ‘ecological grief’ and prompted a wave of last-chance tourists and environmental mourners. From funeral cairns built for a dying glacier in the Swiss Alps, to selfies taken at the disappearing Aral Sea, pilgrims, both religious and secular, are making journeys to find meaningful ways to say goodbye.
But as one world ends, another begins. In Ways to Say Goodbye, Nick Hunt asks what first chances lay ahead? Travelling across continents, through mountains, forests, deserts, coasts and cities, Nick Hunt captures our landscapes in flux. He explores what it means to live in a world that is undergoing vertiginous change, and offers a way we can keep our balance as the ground shifts beneath our feet.
‘A powerful and evocative exploration of disaster and collapse, resilience and renewal’ SHAFIK MEGHJI, author of Small Earthquakes
This is not a book about the end of the world – it’s about the start of a new one.
Melting glaciers. Crumbling coasts. Vanishing seas. The feeling that our world is coming to an end has led to a rise in ‘ecological grief’ and prompted a wave of last-chance tourists and environmental mourners. From funeral cairns built for a dying glacier in the Swiss Alps, to selfies taken at the disappearing Aral Sea, pilgrims, both religious and secular, are making journeys to find meaningful ways to say goodbye.
But as one world ends, another begins. In Ways to Say Goodbye, Nick Hunt asks what first chances lay ahead? Travelling across continents, through mountains, forests, deserts, coasts and cities, Nick Hunt captures our landscapes in flux. He explores what it means to live in a world that is undergoing vertiginous change, and offers a way we can keep our balance as the ground shifts beneath our feet.
Reviews
Hunt is the travelling companion you've always wanted: swashbuckling but learned; plangent when the world is dark, but not constitutionally maudlin. And here he's at his best. This is a requiem - solemn but beautiful. And because the universe is strange, hinting always at the possibility of resurrection.
Blazing with intelligence, wise to immensities, and - fleet-footed messenger between worlds - Puckish as well as profound
A powerful and evocative exploration of disaster and collapse, resilience and renewal, spanning expiring glaciers, sinking cities, vanished seas and shifting sand dunes . . . Nick Hunt is a brilliantly original, perceptive and thought-provoking writer
Here's a paradox: a book that is called Ways to Say Goodbye is also a wonderful celebration of renewal. Nick Hunt is an experienced and compassionate guide on these journeys across shifting terrain and into deep time, from eroding coasts to glacial ice and desert forests. Hunt has composed a vital and tender aubade for the Anthropocene, a gathering of wisdom and ritual to ring in an uncertain future. Ways to Say Goodbye is an essential waybook for a bewildered world.