Author(s): Cal Flyn

Nature | Travel | History

‘Meticulous research, lyrical writing … A book that goes to the eeriest, most desolate places on Earth and finds hope' LOUISE GRAY

This is a book about abandoned places: exclusion zones, no man's lands, ghost towns and post-industrial hinterlands – and what nature does when we're not there to see it.

Exploring some of the eeriest, most desolate places in the world, Cal Flyn asks: what happens after humans pick up and leave? Whether due to war or disaster, disease or economic decay, each extraordinary place visited in this book has been left to its own devices for decades. In this time, nature has been left to work unfettered – offering a glimpse of how abandoned land, even the most polluted regions of the world, might offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

As part of a journey that takes her around the world, Cal Flyn travels to Chernobyl where she meets the scant handful of people who returned to their irradiated homes. She spends a night on an uninhabited Scottish island where feral cattle – descendants of a herd set loose in the 1970s – live wild. She visits a botanical garden lodged high in the cloud forests of Tanzania where exotic plants brought from opposite habitats grow alongside native trees – a show of how adaptable our ecosystems might prove. She visits a Caribbean ghost town where volcanic flows have subsumed the streets. She explores derelict buildings ruled by urban scavengers, sneaks through barbed wire, and walks a beach made of bones on the shore of a dwindling sea.

By turns haunted and hopeful, Flyn's luminous journey is pinned together with new ecological insights that map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we're gone – and how far can our damage to nature be undone?

Though these strange, forgotten landscapes represent some of the most damaged spots on the planet, they are also proof how much potential we have for biological diversity, regrowth and a chance at redemption.

Review:

'Extraordinary ... Just when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain - not scenes where man has never trod, but places where he has been and gone ... Dazzling'
Spectator

'Exhilarating ... A story of the extraordinary resilience of life in some of the most desolate, ravaged and polluted landscapes on earth'
Daily Telegraph

'Fascinating and brain-energising. It is full of detail and colour that sends one googling, to look up pictures and find out more. It is also an optimistic book ... I'll cling to that bit of unfashionable hope'
The Times

'Brave, thorough ... The result is fascinating, eerie and strange ... There is some thrilling writing here, a fine way with the telling detail, and a plea for radical revisioning of what we mean by "nature" and "wild"'
Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman

'Consistently rewarding, eloquently provocative ... a brave book, in more ways than one'
New Humanist

'Scintillating ... she writes beautifully ... Flyn's research is meticulous, but what makes the book so extraordinary is the originality of her thought'
The Herald

'A thoughtful, fascinating read'
Independent

'Brilliant ... Flyn paints vivid pictures ... both clear and compelling'
Daily Telegraph, five stars

'Filled with understanding and adventure ... Written with a beautiful attention to detail and a generous and imaginative frame of mind. The wonderful and surprising thing is how much reassurance and sense of possibility comes out of it at every turn'
Adam Nicolson

'Meticulous research, lyrical writing ... It made me think differently about nature ... A revelation'
Louise Gray, author of The Ethical Carnivore

'Cal Flyn takes us on a mercurial expedition into the strange lands of human surrender ... Thoughtful, careful, fascinating, poignant, mysterious, surreal, compelling, pace pitch-perfect. I could go on ... and on'
Keggie Carew, author of Dadland

Author Biography: Cal Flyn is a freelance journalist from the Highlands of Scotland. She has been a reporter for the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph, and a contributing editor at The Week magazine. She has been published in the New Statesman, The Observer, The Independent, Telegraph Magazine and FT Weekend, and won the 2013 Brandt/Independent on Sunday travel writing prize. THICKER THAN WATER is her first book.