The Edges of the World

In our heavily centralised and conformist world, we sorely need this passionate, imaginative insight into the vital role of life on the borders, the very fringes of the world. Foster makes it clear that the much-vaunted centre is literally a nowhere, a place of soulless self-congratulation and imaginative death. Literal “eccentricity” is where the scientific, artistic and spiritual giants have always found their home. Venture with Foster if you dare, and embrace life. – Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter With ThingsThe Edges of the World is hard to put down –both a passionate broadside against the boring, the overmighty, the false and the tyrannical, and a genre-hopping defence of the marginal, the eccentric and the truly alive. Art, ideas, inventions, change, life itself – all of these, Charles Foster reminds us, emerge from the margins. – Paul Kingsnorth, author of Against the MachineThis book plays pyrotechnics across the mind’s sky: outrageously erudite, mercilessly funny and spectacularly serious. – Jay Griffiths, author of How Animals Heal Us and WildOne of the most interactive books I’ve ever read - in the sense that I’ve filled every page with underlinings, exclamation marks, asterisks, scribbled assents and dissents. Charles Foster is wise, puckish, learned company but the performance, brilliant as it is, is never about its brilliance: he is asking us to consider what it is that makes us human and how might we go about doing a better job of it. – Gregory Norminton, author of The Devil’s HighwayElectrifying, wayward and compulsively brilliant, The Edges of The World lifts back the crackling wires of modernity and beckons to an earth still riven with the strange and the good. The writing is pungent with ideas and bursts of wit and grief in equal measure. Foster understands the holy clarity that edge-things provoke, & the uncanny power of the new encounter. Edges leaps in our hand like a gleeful salmon and we have little choice but to dive into the river after it. – Martin Shaw, author of Liturgies of the WildCharles Foster’s magpie mind gathers shining new treasures in this book, and once again he shows us a different way of understanding what it is to be human. As ever, his scholarship is worn lightly and his storytelling is superb. An ambitious, outrageous quest and a joyful rallying call. – Nick Hunt, author of Outlandish and Red Smoking Mirror

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.