Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2024

With dizzying acuity and insight, James Roberts paints a portrait of a life and its landscapes, creating precious connections with wild creatures and places, from swans in the Cambrian Mountains to wolves in the Pacific Northwest.

By walking at dawn and dusk, in the two lights of awakening and deepening - through the stripped, windswept hills of Wales, and the jungles and savannahs of Africa - he navigates from a soul-stripping sense of loss towards hope in the future. In the presence of wild creatures he finds a way back to life.