- Home
- Non-fiction
- History
- The Moor
The Moor
The Moor: Lives Landscape Literature by William Atkins gives us the story of the moors – from Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Exmoor in the southwest up to the Scottish border, via Yorkshire and Northumberland – and how they have shaped our people, culture and industry.
6 in stock
Join Faber Members for 10% off your first order.
Shortlisted for the 2015 Wainwright Prize
In this journey across England’s most forbidding and mysterious terrain, William Atkins takes the reader from south to north, exploring moorland’s uniquely captivating position in our history, literature and psyche. Atkins’ journey is full of encounters, busy with the voices of the moors, past and present. He shows us that, while the fierce terrains we associate with Wuthering Heights and The Hound of the Baskervilles are very human landscapes, the moors remain daunting and defiant, standing steadfast against the passage of time.
An ambitious mix of history, topography, literary criticism and nature writing, in the tradition of WG Sebald, Robert MacFarlane and Olivia Laing . . . One of the strengths of Atkins's book is its resistance to the obvious.
It is [Atkins'] ability to cheat expectation that gives him impact as a writer . . . [a] remarkable book.
A book that will grip and then send you out, in boots and waterproofs, to see for yourself the expansive seas of brown, green and purple it so vividly describes.
Exquisite, visceral, and perpetually surprising ... An extraordinary new portrait of these mythic blasted heaths.
In William Atkins the moors have found their voice. Beautifully and darkly, with great learning and exquisite observation, the odd wet backbone of England from Cornwall to the Borders is made new. Never have these apparently empty places been revealed as so operative on our national psyche. His is a marvellously saturated book.
The non-fiction book of the year: an astonishing, beautiful and remarkable work of muddy brilliance.
William Atkins’s first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, and his second, The Immeasurable World, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Writing Award. In 2016 he was awarded the British Library Eccles Prize. His journalism and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, the Guardian and the New York Times.
Read MoreBrowse a selection of books we think you might also like, with genre matches and a few wildcards thrown in.
Read an extract from Exiles: Three Island Journeys, William Atkins's exploration of exile, the people who have experienced it, and …
Are you planning a summer getaway? Or not going away and looking for a bit of escapism? Browse our list …
Faber to publish a luminous exploration of exile from William Atkins, the award-winning author of The Immeasurable World and The …
Read an extract from William Atkins' book The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places, taken from the chapter covering his …