The Art of Flight

Accidental Journeys with the Bestselling Author of The Fly Trap Stories just begin. We rarely know where and almost never why. It doesn't matter. Nothing is certain any longer. I just want to shut my eyes, point at random and say, as a sort of experiment, that once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree. That's where it may have started. Fredrik Sj berg continues his exploration of the pleasures and trials of those who spend their time tracing the smallest details of the natural world in these two tales of ambition, fear and hapless romance. Calling on his childhood memories and experience as a hoverfly collector, and following the trail of long forgotten entomologists before him who left their native Sweden for the national parks of the United States, Sj berg contemplates the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on. %%%'Although there is much in this world that is incomprehensible, you can nevertheless discover a meaning as long as you have managed to limit your field of search.' Fredrik Sj berg - collector, romantic, explorer - spends his life tracing the smallest details of the natural world. In these two beautifully wrought tales he meditates on the joy of little things, childhood memories, long-forgotten Swedish entomologists, earthworms, wine-making, the National Parks of the United States, the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on. 'Digressive, discursive and delightful' Daily Telegraph 'A joy . . . Fredrik Sj berg's best-selling memoir The Fly Trapmarked him as a maestro of the episodic. Here, he completes a trilogy' Nature 'Thoroughly entertaining, beguilingly uncategorizable ... By his own admission Sj berg has a "butterfly mind" ... What insures this approach against triviality is the author's patient alertness to pattern, to telling correspondence' Nat Segnit, The Times Literary Supplement