Life through the eyes of eight animals

Cry of the Wild

What is it like to live in a world built by humans? These eight genre-blending stories reveal the complexity, beauty and fragility of wild lives. 
 
'Evocative and beautifully written, it's a deeply immersive read' Observer 
 
'Enchanting and emotional...personifies its characters as they navigate the new wild and its trials.' Chris Packham 
 
'Charles Foster is the most original voice in nature writing today - funny, urgent, poetic, philosophical and deeply moving' Patrick Barkham 
 
'Utterly exhilarating... This book demands we change our ways' Lee Schofield 
 
We have long since isolated ourselves from our fellow animals, banishing them into exile and dominating the land they once roamed. But still they endure on the edges of our existence: a fox grown strong on pepperoni pizza from the dustbins of the East End, a rabbit dodging a bullet, a gannet diving through an oil slick. 
 
In spellbinding prose, Charles Foster gives us a bird’s eye view, or indeed an orca’s or an otter’s, of the wonders and struggles of the natural world. 
 
At once exhilarating and deeply moving, Cry of the Wild reconnects us with our animal side and brings us face to face, or whisker to whisker, with eight creatures (including humans) that we have pushed to the fringes, imploring us to change our ways. 
 
'There aren't many writers like Charles around... a deeply thought-provoking book' James Aldred 
 
'Reading this book feels like being made suddenly omniscient. In other words, you really have to' Tom Moorhouse 
 
'Astonishingly playful, humorous, immensely varied and outrageously intelligent... The most inventive British writer presently at work on the theme of nature' Mark Cocker

Highly imaginative... Evocative and beautifully written, it's a deeply immersive read.

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 Wonders

Utterly 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 Fell

Cry 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 Hedgerow

Charles 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.

There 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 Summer

Fiercely 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.

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.

A lyrical work of creative nonfiction containing eight stories of besieged animal lives. Emotional without being anthropomorphic, it is a thought-provoking read.

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.

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 Tides

Like 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.

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.

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.

A fox, grown strong on pepperoni pizza from the dustbins of the East End, dances along a railway track towards Essex, the territory of wild foxes and wilder huntsmen. 
 
An orca, mourning the loss of her mother in a valley west of Skye, knows that she must now lead the pod as matriarch. She swims again through her childhood, thinking about the old ways, the old roads, laid down thousands of years ago. But the old roads aren't so easy now. 
 
At moonrise in a West Country river, an otter floats slowly downstream. The tide, though it pushes him landwards when it exhales, seems to pull him out when it inhales. He turns on his back. He can see the stars clearly for the first time and wonders if he can swim to them. 
 
The land has never stopped waiting. It has only ever been in exile, right under our noses, waiting to confound, outrage and re-enchant.

Charles Foster

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 Things

The 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 Machine

This book plays pyrotechnics across the mind's sky: outrageously erudite, mercilessly funny and spectacularly serious.

Jay Griffiths, author of How Animals Heal Us and Wild

One 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 Highway

Electrifying, 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 Wild

Charles 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

At the margins of life, lands and history

We tend to think that everything important comes from the centre: from big cities, from established orthodoxies in the sciences and the arts, from the Establishment in all its forms. We think this because the centre tells us it is so, but it's a lie. It is only at the edges that we think, innovate and thrive. 
 
This book travels to the far frontiers of the planet, and of human culture and consciousness; to the edges of continents, of evolution, of artistic and political movements, and of life itself: from a rocky precipice in the Peloponnese where the first human set foot in Europe to an ancient Egyptian temple where monotheism was invented; from St Francis, kissing lepers’ sores to the giant bird-eating mice of St Kilda. 
 
Why do we stare at sunsets? Why do we celebrate birthdays and grieve for those who are gone? Why do all adventures begin when we leave and get lost? Who has the better view of reality – the Government or the dispossessed? And what happens when we live with the knowledge that we’re all teetering on the edge of the dark?

Charles Foster

Praise for 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 m ...

The 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, t ...

This book plays pyrotechnics across the mind's sky: outrageously erudite, mercilessly funny and spectacularly serious.

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 m ...

The 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, t ...

This book plays pyrotechnics across the mind's sky: outrageously erudite, mercilessly funny and spectacularly serious.

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 m ...

The 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, t ...

This book plays pyrotechnics across the mind's sky: outrageously erudite, mercilessly funny and spectacularly serious.

Books by Charles Foster

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter