Connemara

Connemara

Listening to the Wind

Summary

The first volume in Tim Robinson's phenomenal Connemara Trilogy - which Robert Macfarlane has called 'One of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English'.

In its landscape, history and folklore, Connemara is a singular region: ill-defined geographically, and yet unmistakably a place apart from the rest of Ireland. Tim Robinson, who established himself as Ireland's most brilliant living non-fiction writer with the two-volume Stones of Aran, moved from Aran to Connemara nearly twenty years ago. This book is the result of his extraordinary engagement with the mountains, bogs and shorelines of the region, and with its folklore and its often terrible history: a work as beautiful and surprising as the place it attempts to describe.

Chosen as a book of the year by Iain Sinclair, Robert Macfarlane and Colm Tóibín

'One of the greatest writers of lands ... No one has disentangled the tales the stones of Ireland have to tell so deftly and retold them so beautifully' Fintan O'Toole

'Dazzling ... an indubitable classic' Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller

'He is that rarest of phenomena, a scientist and an artist, and his method is to combine scientific rigour with artistic reverie in a seamless blend that both informs and delights' John Banville

'One of contemporary Ireland's finest literary stylists' Joseph O'Connor, Guardian

Reviews

  • Many landscape writers have striven to give their prose the characteristics of the terrain they are describing. Few have succeeded as fully as Robinson.
    Robert Macfarlane, Guardian

About the author

Tim Robinson

A native of Yorkshire, Tim Robinson studied maths at Cambridge and then worked for many years as a visual artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London, among other places. In 1972 he moved to the Aran Islands and commenced a multi-decade project of mapping and writing about Aran and Connemara. He is the author of the two-volume Stones of Aran and the Connemara trilogy, each published to great acclaim. He died in 2020.
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