Two Lights: Walking Through Landscapes of Loss and Life

An extraordinary account of searching for the wildness left in our world – spanning continents and geological eras, skies and oceans, animals and birds, and even the planets and stars.

‘A moving meditation on loss and fragility, tenderly tracing a love of wild creatures across landscapes of damaged yet deeply felt meaning. Startling and generous beauty, Two Lights finds light in the wondrous presence of others and the interconnectedness of all living things.’

Julian Hoffman, author of Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2024.

An extraordinary account of searching for the wildness left in our world – spanning continents and geological eras, skies and oceans, animals and birds, and even the planets and stars. With dizzying acuity and insight 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 tries to navigate 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.

‘Evocatively illustrated and elegantly written.’

Country Life

 

‘A beautiful, vivid work … [His] writing is lyrical, empathetic and keenly observed – there is joy as well as sorrow in his words and a reminder to savour the beauty that remains in this world.’

Western Daily Mail

 

‘Radical and earthy; superlative and sensible … bright, accomplished stuff .’

Patrick Laurie, author of Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape

 

‘A beautifully written, wonderfully tender – and ultimately hopeful – journey through all that we stand to lose on this ever-more-challenged Earth.’

Sharon Blackie, author of If Women Rose Rooted

 

‘A book about what it means to be fully alive in a time of endings: personal, planetary. Deeply moving and rich in surprising perspectives on wild places and our relationship to them.’

Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep

 

‘Deeply personal yet always outward looking, James Roberts delights in the world he discovers about him. Yet he also trembles, because he understands like winter light, that world is diminished … and diminishing … Two Lights reveals why all of us should be writers.’

Robert Minhinnick, poet and author of Diary of the Last Man

 

‘Two Lights is filled with awe-inspiring joy, but also death and decline brought from extermination, fire, flooding and pollution. Roberts is Wales’ own Henry David Thoreau, of whom he writes so eloquently. He is on a mission, and we can follow by reading his work and hopefully, by example.’

BuzzMag

 

‘A meditative and hopeful account of walking through the wild, shifting landscapes of Wales, at all hours of the day and night, and often through times of personal darkness, in search of connection with the earth and its creatures. Roberts’ reflections on the healing power of watching nature change are sensitively expressed, with beautiful, often stark illustrations.’

The Tablet

Read a sample chapter.

Also available in ebook.