Cry of the Wild

Highly imaginative… Evocative and beautifully written, it’s a deeply immersive read. * Observer *Charles Foster is the most original voice in nature writing today - funny, urgent, poetic, philosophical and deeply moving. These shape-shifting, illuminating stories send us into the souls of other animals, bequeathing them personhood and giving us precious enlightenment and, hopefully, the inspiration to take action. – Patrick Barkham, author of Wild Green WondersUtterly exhilarating. Cry of the Wild gives us the chance to viscerally inhabit the lives of a cast of wild creatures as they navigate the rigours of a changed world. By turns tragic and joyful, every story yields fascinating insights into the way our fellow earthlings make their way through life. Through their eyes, we see ourselves, and the unholy ecological havoc we’re wreaking. With the power both to move and to shame us, this book demands that we change our ways. – Lee Schofield, author of Wild FellCry of the Wild is spectacular and unique. It is beautiful and engrossing, full of erudition and heart. Foster’s detailed eloquence brings us within a chromosome’s thickness of experiencing first-hand our impacts on the lives of his eight wild protagonists - so that reading this book feels like being made suddenly omniscient. In other words, you really have to. – Tom Moorhouse, author of Ghosts in the HedgerowCharles Foster’s new volume of animal stories may be challenging in content and deadly serious in terms of its moral purpose, but his prose is also astonishingly playful, humorous, immensely varied and outrageously intelligent. For my money he is the most inventive British writer presently at work on the theme of nature. – Mark Cocker, author of Our PlaceThere aren’t many writers like Charles around… His ability to step across emotional boundaries and enter the consciousness of the wild makes for an exhilarating, immersive, yet at times disturbing read. For me, the end result is a deeply thought-provoking book that encourages the reader to explore for themselves exactly where they stand on issues of humanity, conservation and moral legacy. – James Aldred, author of Goshawk SummerFiercely polemical, forcing the reader to see the world in a new light… Charles Foster is an original thinker with a strangely compelling prose style… Cry of the Wild is thought-provoking, profound, at times infused with a beautifully wistful lyricism and often witty. * Country Life *Foster [brings] a sense of wonder: geese fly in from the north with snow falling from their wings; imagined through the eyes of a young rabbit, a white owl wafts through the still night air like thistledown, a strangely beautiful occurrence that might at any moment end the rabbit’s life… He avoids the temptations of anthropomorphism while reminding us that we who share these traits are more vulnerably and elegantly animal than we pretend. * Literary Review *A lyrical work of creative nonfiction containing eight stories of besieged animal lives. Emotional without being anthropomorphic, it is a thought-provoking read. * BBC Wildlife Magazine *Ardent and arresting… one of the darkest, most haunting books I’ve read in a long time… Yet the stories are also motivated by such depth of attention and love that their very existence offers some hope for a better future. * New Statesman *I have read Cry of the Wild with something approaching awe… The conviction with which these characters live on the page and suffer the assaults of existence can certainly live happily and proudly alongside Tarka. – Adam Nicolson, author of Life Between the TidesLike Tarka, the stories in Cry of the Wild are not written for children. They take on the qualities of myth and magic which touch the source of our deepest feelings. How does the word on the printed page do this? … the prose is muscular and astonishing… “Immersion” is a word commonly used about reading these days. I dislike it intensely. The sound of the word feels cold, unpleasant, like being pressed underwater. Not at all the deep sobbing that emerged from somewhere as I sat with these stories… This is not like any other nature book. * Caught by the River Foster weaves together natural history and good storytelling so well… If you enjoy reading about nature, you will like this book. If you rarely think about nature, you must read this book. – **** * Fortean Times *Poetic, evocative, enchanting and emotional…personifies its characters as they navigate the new wild and its trials.

Charles Foster is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, and won the Ig Nobel Prize for Biology and the 30 Millions d’Amis Prize. He is a fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford, and has particular passions for Greece, waves, the Upper Palaeolithic, mountains and swifts.

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