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  • Published: 15 February 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099539773
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $24.99

Edgelands




Shortlisted for the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and winner of the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Prize - this is a book about the blank spaces on the A-Z: the lost and unloved 'edgelands' between cities and countryside

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps.

In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst.

Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.

  • Published: 15 February 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099539773
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $24.99

About the authors

Michael Symmons Roberts

Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. He has published six collections of poetry and received a number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. As a librettist, his work has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. An award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, he has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Paul Farley

Paul Farley is the author of four collections of poetry and has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E.M. Forster Award. He broadcasts regularly on radio and presents The Echo Chamber on Radio 4. Edgelands, co-written with Michael Symmons Roberts, received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and the 2011 Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award and was serialised as Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Praise for Edgelands

Haunting, often inspiring book...Edgelands covers an impressive range of politics, reminiscence, investigation and rumination

Scotland on Sunday

A masterpiece of its kind... Even more uplifting is the chapter on weather - truly one of the most extraordinary passages of prose I have read in some time... This is, quite simply, beautiful, but it is also typical of a beautifully conceived work of exploration, by two emissaries to the wilderness who do the wasteland proud

John Burnside, The Times

The edgelands, where the veneer of civilisation peels away, are the most despised and ignored of landscapes. Ambition turns to dust in the sewage farm and landfill site. But Farley and Roberts's mischievous and elegant forays into these marginal wastes, show that dust turns back to life in them - into riotous ecologies, agitprop architecture and the wonderful business of playing. A provocative, left-field read

Richard Mabey

A book that begs us to use our imaginations; to appreciate what we pass by every day but never really see

Metro

Marvellously quirky, fascinatingly detailed and beautifully written

Daily Telegraph

This book is a delight: witty and wryly contrarian

Robert MacFarlane, Guardian

Eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book ... overall this is an original, surprising and rather wonderful addition to our literature of place

Sunday Telegraph

Edgelands delights with its sly, impish wit and observation

Spectator

With chapters on paths, dens, wastelands, business parks and many other topics, this book has opened my eyes to all kinds of things I might not have noticed before

Wendy Cope, Daily Telegraph

This is a delightful and important book. By focusing on the fringes, on the shabby reality of suburban life, these poets remind us that there are always new myths for old, that the 'edgelands' may even be our true centre

John Greening, Country Life

[An] eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book

Daily Telegraph

Written in a delectable prose that scatters flashes of poetry over a sardonic undertow of social comment, Edgelands is a lyrical triumph. On Britain's grotty margins, the duo trace "desire paths" to find beauty and mystery in the rough darkness on the edge of town

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

A 2011 favourite

Wendy Cope, Observer, Books of the Year

The year's most unusual travel book

Tom Chesshyre, The Times