The Raven's Nest

(Hardback, Main)

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In 2008, on a week-long trip to a film festival in Iceland, Sarah Thomas was spellbound by the strange landscape she found herself in, a place whose midwinter full moon is brighter than daylight, where fierce storms shake iron-clad houses and northern lights pattern the night sky, where the meaning of the word for yes - ja - is imbued with ambiguity when spoken on an inbreath. A place in which, and with which, it is possible to think differently.

An immediate love for this country and a man she meets there, Bjarni, turns what was intended to be a short stay into a profoundly transformative half decade, one which radically alters Sarah's understanding of herself and the natural world. As her marriage unravels due to her and Bjarni's struggle to communicate across cultures, they decide to divorce, just as a tremor swarm heralds a major volcanic eruption.

Written in beautifully vivid prose, The Raven's Nest is a profoundly moving meditation on place, identity, and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption.

Reviews

A deeply thoughtful, vivid, enquiring, genre-traversing book, closely attentive to the people and the landscapes with which it dwells. It asks hard questions - and offers no easy answers - about what it means to belong to a place, and to live well upon a part of the earth. Sarah's writing - crisp in its details, patient in its rhythms - draws its readers northwards and inwards upon a fascinating journey. * Robert Macfarlane *
Sarah Thomas' lyrical, thoughtful prose takes us on a journey, both physical and emotional, to the far north. * Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment *
An insightful, intuitive introduction to Icelandic culture, folklore, mysticism, language and nature. * Times Literary Supplement *
A quiet, generous and beautifully written meditation on what it means to try to belong to a singular culture on the 'edge' of Europe. * Literary Review *
Thomas' writing is the stuff of dreams - not in any whimsical way - rather, in the way of bones and stones; light and dark; hopes and fears. She leads the reader through various portals - from a place of unknowing - to one of hope. This book maps the self, the world and the spaces in between with such tender care. Truly a thing of wonder. * Kerri n Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places *
A metamorphic book bursting with ideas and insights about belonging, acceptance, and supernatural joy. A chronicle of Iceland's ever-strange, prismic beauty and the myriad ways it works on the heart. * Dan Richards, author of Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth *
The Raven's Nest asks what it means to belong to a place from which we do not originate. Anthropological and tender in detail. * Abi Andrews, author The Word for Woman is Wilderness *
The Raven's Nest is a candid yet beautiful memoir, an homage both to Iceland and a rapidly changing way of life, and a meditation on the constantly shifting nature of human identity. Thomas's evocative prose leaves striking images which glow in the memory long after the reading has ended. * Katharine Norbury, author of The Fish Ladder *
Sarah Thomas evokes characters and the culture, a sense of time and the landscape in beautiful prose which makes my brain do cartwheels. * Nancy Campbell, author of The Library of Ice *
The Raven's Nest is about a meeting of worlds. Sarah arrives in Iceland with a 'guest's clear eyes', as Icelanders say. A sincere and perceptive book that explores love, adventure and the search for connections in a big world. * Andri Snr Magnason, author of On Time and Water *
A delicate cartography of emotional landscapes as well as place, The Raven's Nest is also a journey into to the heart of our planetary crisis. Beautiful, moving and fascinating. * Nick Hunt, author of Outlandish *

Author Bio

Sarah Thomas is a writer and filmmaker. Her films have been screened internationally, and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain journal. Her writing has also appeared in the Guardian and the anthology Women on Nature edited by Katharine Norbury. In 2020 she was nominated for the Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award. She was longlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for the proposal for this book.