Latitudes : Encounters with a Changing Planet

2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist (Environmental Literature)

Relating thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of a changing planet. At once memoir, journal and travelogue of Earth's wildernesses, this remarkable book ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada.

A powerful, innovative work of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an age of dramatic ecological loss, Latitudes shows us the importance of listening to the living world that is speaking to us, if we open ourselves to hear its voice. Full of lived experience, it ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect.

"McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." Publishers Weekly
"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year." Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio