Landmarks

byRobert Macfarlane, Roy McMillan (Read by)
Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Landmarks, a fascinating exploration of the relationship between language and landscapes by Robert Macfarlane, read by Roy McMillan.

Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

The audiobook version contains an exclusive bonus chapter - a recording of Finlay MacLeod (a novelist, historian, broadcaster, archivist and one of the dedicatees of Landmarks) reading words and definitions from his Peat Glossary for the Isle of Lewis. This hoard of rare and evocative terms was one of the inspiring documents for the book.

Finlay's voice is also used as a divider between chapters; and the other glossaries in the text are themselves bracketed with appropriate sound effects.

A magnificent meditation on walking and writing. An astonishingly haunted book

Adam Nicolson (on The Old Ways), Daily Telegraph

About Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. As a lyricist and performer, he has written albums and songs with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023). In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is currently completing his third book with Jackie Morris: The Lost Birds.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241972731
  • Length: 531 minutes
  • Price: £10.00
All editions