The Savage Landscape : How We Made the Wilderness

Cal Flyn goes looking for answers to a troublesome question: What is wilderness?

This is a book about searching in the best sense – full of ideas, beauty, doubt and adventures, as Elizabeth Kolbert writes.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of "Islands of Abandonment" comes a new book about our relationship to the natural world. This book takes us into the wild – deep into dark forests, to the top of mountains, and into the heart of deserts.

It addresses our deep yearnings to be awed and inspired by landscapes that remain beyond our reach and examines what nature gets up to in the absence of humans.

In ten chapters, each loosely structured around a visit to some of the world's wildest and most invigorating landscapes, the book asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might best be appreciated or preserved.

These locations have been chosen for their physical beauty, their perceived isolation, and the moral or emotional complexity of the human stories that can be found there.

In this search for wilderness, we meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert, lonely shepherds seeing off wolves under the stars, missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle, and wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.