Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

(Paperback)

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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR
WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT CONSERVATION AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE

This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no mans lands and fortress islands and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.

In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once Americas fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods.

This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live or survive in tiny, precarious numbers to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankinds impact on nature is forced to stop. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after were gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone

More praise for Islands of Abandonment

Extraordinary Just when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain Dazzling SPECTATOR

A haunting look at how nature fights back Beautiful, evocative SUNDAY TIMES

Flyns brave, thorough book sets out to explore places where angels fear to tread The result is fascinating, eerie and strange There is some thrilling writing here KATHLEEN JAMIE, NEW STATESMAN

Wonderful ADAM NICOLSON

Exhilarating DAILY TELEGRAPH

Reviews

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 Ill 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

Certainly a book of the year for me Sebastian Faulks

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 Bio

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.