In The Sunday Times yesterday, the paper’s critics offered their choice of the top 25 non-fiction books of the century so far. Among them was Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, a life-affirming account of “what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place”. That book — one of my own favourites of 2021 — won her The Sunday Times/Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.
The paper also had a review by James McConnachie of Flyn’s latest book: The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness (William Collins, £20), in which she travels to wild and remote places — from Mount Sinai to Yellowstone and Antarctica — to see how humans have used or interpreted wilderness. “Where many contemporary nature writers emphasise joy,” McConnachie says, “Flyn leans into discomfort — physical, intellectual, moral.” The Savage Landscape is “pungent and intelligent”, a wonderful book, but a “slightly lonely one, perhaps”.

Also in The Sunday Times, in the travel section, Chris Haslam interviewed Brian Jackman, that great observer of the African bush, about his new book, Lion Song. It is, Haslam says, “as much the essential guidebook to African safari as it is an alarm call to the threats facing the wildlife he knows so well”.