Savage Gods - Paperback Edition

‘The most incredible book I read this year.’ David Keenan, Guardian Books of the Year After moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expected to find contentment. It was the goal he had sought — to nest, to find home — after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he found that his tools as a writer were failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself. Informed by his travels across the world, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world – or are they part of the great lie which is killing it? ‘Savage Gods is a deeply personal memoir of the ecology of home and an unusual and frank account of a writer’s experience.’ Melanie Challenger ‘Horrible and brilliant and terribly important.’ Charles Foster ‘There are few writers as raw or brave on the page.’ Los Angeles Review of Books ‘Kingsnorth’s troublesome words do an unexpectedly moving job of capturing the problem of being, and of writing about it.’ Nina Lyon, The Spectator Paul Kingsnorth is an acclaimed writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. His books include One No, Many Yeses, Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, Beast and The Wake, which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His journalism appears widely, including for The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph and the London Review of Books. His new novel will be published by Faber & Faber in 2021. He lives with his family on a small-holding in the west of Ireland.