A Book of Noises

‘A whistlestop tour past thunderstorms, volcanoes, bees, blackbirds, bells, haiku, earworms, noise pollution, climate change, even silence… The way Henderson plucks and assembles his sources from literally centuries of collected knowledge is an impressive feat’ - The Wire‘A pursuit of auditory wonders - a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence… Ransacking A Book of Noises affords hours of listening pleasure… Readers can and should take their time. It will be time well spent’ - Spectator‘Henderson’s appetite for marvellous phenomena, and commitment to searching them out, makes him a most congenial literary companion… [Henderson is] as intriguing as he is eclectic… Readers will come away struck by different items in the glittering array here. Henderson offers them up with just enough commentary to leave you wanting more… a heartfelt extended plea to pay closer attention to the things around us, and a guide to the rewards that can come from doing that: a secular invitation to renew a sense of wonder, as a bulwark against the disenchantment’ - ArtDesk‘This exploration of the ‘auraculous’ world of sound - the word is Henderson’s own coinage, conflating the aural and the miraculous - is full […] of wonders… fascinating’ - Literary Review 

CASPAR HENDERSON has been a journalist and an editor: a contributor to BBC Radio 4, Financial Times, Guardian, Nature, New Scientist and openDemocracy. His debut, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings (Granta, 2012), won the Roger Deakin Award of the Society of Authors and the Jerwood Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. A New Map of Wonders (Granta) was published in 2017. A Book of Noises will be published by Granta in October 2023. He lives in Oxford.