Cry of the Wild - by Charles Foster (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

'Evocative and beautifully written, it's a deeply immersive read' Observer

'Enchanting and emotional...personifies its characters as they navigate the new wild and its trials.' Chris Packham

'Charles Foster is the most original voice in nature writing today - funny, urgent, poetic, philosophical and deeply moving' Patrick Barkham

'Utterly exhilarating... This book demands we change our ways' Lee Schofield

'There aren't many writers like Charles around... a deeply thought-provoking book' James Aldred

'Reading this book feels like being made suddenly omniscient. In other words, you really have to' Tom Moorhouse

'Astonishingly playful, humorous, immensely varied and outrageously intelligent... The most inventive British writer presently at work on the theme of nature' Mark Cocker

What is it like to live in a world built by humans? These eight genre-blending stories reveal the complexity, beauty and fragility of wild lives - a brilliantly modern twist on classics like Watership Down and Tarka the Otter.

We have long since isolated ourselves from our fellow animals, banishing them into exile and dominating the land they once roamed. But still they endure on the edges of our existence: a fox grown strong on pepperoni pizza from the dustbins of the East End, a rabbit dodging a bullet, a gannet diving through an oil slick.

In spellbinding prose, Charles Foster gives us a bird's eye view, or indeed an orca's or an otter's, of the wonders and struggles of the natural world.

At once exhilarating and deeply moving, Cry of the Wild reconnects us with our animal side and brings us face to face, or whisker to whisker, with eight creatures (including humans) that we have pushed to the fringes, imploring us to change our ways.

Review Quotes

"Foster is the kind of effortlessly adept writer likely to drive other authors to envy, and his bold gamble to break the scientific taboo around imagining animals' interior lives pays off magnificently. Readers will be awed." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review )

"Highly imaginative... Evocative and beautifully written, it's a deeply immersive read." --Observer
"Fiercely polemical, forcing the reader to see the world in a new light... Charles Foster is an original thinker with a strangely compelling prose style... Cry of the Wild is thought-provoking, profound, at times infused with a beautifully wistful lyricism and often witty." ―Country Life
"Foster [brings] a sense of wonder: geese fly in from the north with snow falling from their wings; imagined through the eyes of a young rabbit, a white owl wafts through the still night air like thistledown, a strangely beautiful occurrence that might at any moment end the rabbit's life... He avoids the temptations of anthropomorphism while reminding us that we who share these traits are more vulnerably and elegantly animal than we pretend." --Literary Review
"Emotional without being anthropomorphic, it is a thought-provoking read." ―BBC Wildlife Magazine
"Like Tarka, the stories in Cry of the Wild are not written for children. They take on the qualities of myth and magic which touch the source of our deepest feelings. How does the word on the printed page do this? ... the prose is muscular and astonishing... "Immersion" is a word commonly used about reading these days. I dislike it intensely. The sound of the word feels cold, unpleasant, like being pressed underwater. Not at all the deep sobbing that emerged from somewhere as I sat with these stories... This is not like any other nature book." ― Caught by the River
"Being a Human, like Being a Beast, the (also extraordinary) book that preceded it, is both a learned treatise and a kind of visionary journalism; it reports back from the edges of our cramped consciousness." ―The Atlanticon Being a Human
"Foster is a writer of extraordinary ability. His descriptions of nature dazzle . . . Being a Human[is] a lesson in what to watch for in nature. It's a discourse on the sentience we may have had as early humans and that, over millennia, we've somehow roasted into a crisp. It's funny. It's moving. It's mind-expanding. It's a collection of thoughts to read again and again." ―Forbes on Being a Human
."A magpie book full of intriguing anthropological sketches . . . that fits neatly into the growing library of modern British natural history writing, alongside the best of Nan Shepherd, Robert Macfarlane, and Roger Deakin." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred) on Being a Human
"A truly wonderful book . . . in the literal sense of the phrase. A book of wonders." ―Lewis H. Lapham, The World in Time podcast (Lapham's Quarterly) on Being a Human

About the Author

Charles Foster is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, and won the Ig Nobel Prize for Biology and the 30 Millions d'Amis Prize. He is a fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford, and has particular passions for Greece, waves, the Upper Palaeolithic, mountains and swifts.