Landmarks

Robert Macfarlane — 2015

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2016 Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it. Praise for Robert Macfarlane: 'He has a poet's eye and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy' John Banville, Observer "I'll read anything Macfarlane writes" David Mitchell, Independent 'Every movement needs stars. In [Macfarlane] we surely have one, burning brighter with each book.' Telegraph '[Macfarlane] is a godfather of a cultural moment' Sunday Times

Reviews

p.@softrosemint

Mar 25, 2023

Robert Macfarlane is quickly shaping up to be one of my favourite non-fiction writers. There is something very earnest and wonderous about his writing and he has an exception talent for impressing that same sense of wonder with the natural world around us upon the reader.

The focus of "Landmarks" is language and the way we talk about nature and landscapes. It offers not only a large lexicon of descriptors that may have or are about to fall out of use but also an insight on some of the brightest writers about the natural world. Macfarlane speaks with such gentleness about both writing on nature and nature itself that one cannot help but read "Landmarks" like a love letter, one that the reader eventually becomes party to.