Book Shop News

‘What was that book featured on the radio the other day?’

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn

James Naughtie and a group of readers talk to Cal Flyn about her acclaimed book, Islands of Abandonment.

This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place. In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild.

In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankind’s impact on nature is forced to stop. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world – and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone?

Available to buy from Coles Books HERE or by clicking the image below

‘What was that book featured on the radio the other day?’

The Radio 4 Book of the Week, split into 5 episodes, is broadcast each morning at 9.45am.

Starting Monday 30th January 2023, Alec Newman reads from Rob Percival’s ‘The Meat Paradox’

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies and the logic of globalisation, by geopolitical tensions and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo – pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises – and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.

‘Should we eat animals?’ was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.

In The Meat Paradox, Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn’t eat meat.

Copies of Rob’s book are available from Coles HERE or through clicking the image below:

‘What was that book featured on the radio the other day?’