Two Lights: Walking at Dawn and Dusk on a Turning Planet

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2024

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

‘Evocatively illustrated and elegantly written’

Country Life

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.

‘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

 

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

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

 

‘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

 

‘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

 

‘Evocatively illustrated and elegantly written’

Country Life