The Wild Places Paperback - 2008

'A formidable consideration by a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence – poetry, really – with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach transcend the physical region he exploresthe natural world swells with meaning through Macfarlane's devoted observations, which can be both minutely detailed and vast in scopelike the wild it parses, [this book] quietly returns us to ourselves.'
– The New York Times Book Review

'InspiringMacfarlane brings these landscapes to pulsing lifeHis precision in apprehending the world is a salutary lesson in and of itselfHis descriptions have created a new map of Britain and Ireland in my mind. And like pebbles in a pond, those descriptions are now altering the way I look at the world immediately around me.. this is the final gift of Macfarlane's wild places: they illuminate the wild wonder of our everyday world.'
– National Geographic Traveler

' The Wild Places boldly celebrates places that aren't supposed toexist, and does so in prose that is at times very nearly as vividand beautiful as the thing itself.'
Rebecca Solnit

' Prose as precise as this is not just evocative. It is a manifestoin itself. Macfarlane's language urges us to gaze more closely atthe wonders around us, to take notice, to remind ourselves howthrillingly alive a spell in the wild can make us seem.'
The Sunday Times (UK)

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prizewinning books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland . He has contributed to Harper's, Granta, The New Yorker, the Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.