Belonging

Outstanding -- ROBERT MACFARLANE A beautifully written meditation on rural surroundings and her place within them * * Sunday Times * * Amanda Thomson's new book manages to carve out a distinctive niche for itself . . . This is a passionate book and infused with a sense of rootedness -- STUART KELLY * * The Scotsman * * In recent years rural landscapes have turned into battlegrounds, and nature writing has become increasingly polemical. Belonging is a quiet book of questions in a genre full of answers, but it is all the more powerful and beautiful for this -- PATRICK GALBRAITH * * TLS * * One of the best things I have read in ages . . . Quiet and beautiful and powerful -- ALYS FOWLER Thomson writes of the natural in a way I have yet to encounter before. There is no real hoo-haa, no flowery description of which to speak yet somehow, I came away with that ache inside me - that renewed obsession with the world that is only borne of a very particular kind of writing - poetic, loving, raw . . . Like no other -- KERRI Ni DOCHARTAIGH * * Caught by the River * * Whether writing about nature, about family, about art, or about identity, Amanda Thomson brings a careful and a thoughtful attention to the page. She shows how the threads of a life - its passions and preoccupations - are intricately entangled, each illuminating and complicating the other -- MALACHY TALLACK A book that digs deep . . . Vivid * * Herald * * In belonging, Thomson invites us to think about what living with the land really means: not just beautiful and wild places, but cities, suburbs, old houses, the places that shape us in childhood and beyond, too. This is an evocative, intimate journey through the ways we find home - in family, place, history and language -- JESSICA J. LEE Lyrical * * Country Living * *