Wild : An Elemental Journey

Winner of the Orion Book Award

Part travelogue, part manifesto for wildness as an essential character of life, Wild is a one-of-a-kind book from a one-of-a-kind author. Over seven years, Jay Griffiths embarked on an extraordinary odyssey that was by turns a green riot and a deathly bleakness. She travelled to the freedom fighters of West Papua, met cannibals infinitely kinder than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them, and discovered a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma—for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle, and what is wild is kind.

Courageous and sometimes dangerous, this journey is by turns funny, touching and harrowing. Griffiths offers a poetic consideration of the tender connection between human society and wildlands, written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject. The result is a truly necessary book—passionate, rigorous and utterly honest—that speaks to something essential about what it means to be alive.

'Undefinable, untameable, profound and extraordinary' Observer
'A masterpiece' Maria Popova
'Easily the best travel book that I have read in the last ten years' Guardian