Americas
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Surfacing
"[Kathleen Jamie's] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over - not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth's, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest." -Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, "By the Book" in The New York Times Book Review.
An immersive exploration of time and place in a shrinking world, from the award-winning author of Sightlines.
In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressiely preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.
An immersive exploration of time and place in a shrinking world, from the award-winning author of Sightlines.
In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressiely preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.
Editorial Reviews
Shortlisted for the 2020 Highland Book Prize
"[Kathleen Jamie's] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over - not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth's, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest." -Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, "By the Book" in the New York Times Book Review.
"Splendid… Jamie's crisp language places you in a near-meditative state." -Monica Drake, The New York Times Book Review
"Jamie connects the relics of distant ages with the daily routines in front of her…. Jamie appears more gregarious than Thoreau and most other nature writers. While the genre is deeply populated by solitaries, her essays brim with people." -Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal
"Throughout it all, the reader encounters passages of breathtaking beauty [...] though Jamie always finds herself relentlessly tugged away from primordial beauty toward anxieties of the modern world and a looming sense of catastrophe, the immediacy of her surroundings giving way to a geologic sense of time." -Ernest Hilbert, The Washington Post
"Like her previous works, Surfacing is rich in connections and observations that grant the reader new ways of seeing …. Jamie excavates long-forgotten memories in some, and then writes of two very different digs in northern lands that are as stark and beautiful as any nature writing but also witty and well-peopled – qualities less typical of the genre." -Patrick Barkham, The Guardian
"Kathleen Jamie's stories of what the earth revels as our coastlines erode pose a profoundly important question: what is it that our civilization has lost sight of and might the artifacts uncovered there help us to heal our relationships with each other and the more-than-human world? To read Surfacing is to travel in the company of a curious and dear friend, equally attuned to the hawk on the horizon as she is to the ground beneath her feet." -Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
"In Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie-one of Scotland's leading poets and an exquisite prose writer-tracks travel observations and...
"[Kathleen Jamie's] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over - not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth's, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest." -Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, "By the Book" in the New York Times Book Review.
"Splendid… Jamie's crisp language places you in a near-meditative state." -Monica Drake, The New York Times Book Review
"Jamie connects the relics of distant ages with the daily routines in front of her…. Jamie appears more gregarious than Thoreau and most other nature writers. While the genre is deeply populated by solitaries, her essays brim with people." -Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal
"Throughout it all, the reader encounters passages of breathtaking beauty [...] though Jamie always finds herself relentlessly tugged away from primordial beauty toward anxieties of the modern world and a looming sense of catastrophe, the immediacy of her surroundings giving way to a geologic sense of time." -Ernest Hilbert, The Washington Post
"Like her previous works, Surfacing is rich in connections and observations that grant the reader new ways of seeing …. Jamie excavates long-forgotten memories in some, and then writes of two very different digs in northern lands that are as stark and beautiful as any nature writing but also witty and well-peopled – qualities less typical of the genre." -Patrick Barkham, The Guardian
"Kathleen Jamie's stories of what the earth revels as our coastlines erode pose a profoundly important question: what is it that our civilization has lost sight of and might the artifacts uncovered there help us to heal our relationships with each other and the more-than-human world? To read Surfacing is to travel in the company of a curious and dear friend, equally attuned to the hawk on the horizon as she is to the ground beneath her feet." -Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
"In Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie-one of Scotland's leading poets and an exquisite prose writer-tracks travel observations and...
Readers Top Reviews
Richard KnechtMeg ia
Beautifully rendered and accurate essays about her experience in Alaska and beyond. I found her description of Quinhagak and the excavations moving and spot-on. It made me feel like I was there- and in fact I was.
Dr Foodie
The author takes the reader on a few journeys that look into the relationship of humanity over time, with a particular look at two archeological digs.
Wanderer
Time and place all coexist in the same frame. The surface is now and it too is fleeting. Through observation of nature and archaeology, Kathleen Jamison leads us into the metaphysical.
KatherineKimberly M.
the book came to me quickly and as advertised! No issues with seller.
