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Cry of the Wild

Life through the eyes of eight animals

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

'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.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 25, 2024
      This wonderfully unconventional work of creative nonfiction from Foster (Being a Human), a law professor at Oxford University, draws on scientific research to provide novelistic accounts of how rabbits, otters, and other animals are facing the challenges of living in a human-dominated world. The stories impart both scientific background on their animal subjects and hauntingly intimate perspectives on their plights. For instance, Foster depicts orcas’ capacity to “experience a prolonged grief” by describing a pod’s deranged behavior after a collision with a container ship killed their matriarch (“Their speech and their jumps were flat, they sometimes groomed one another manically and sometimes forgot to groom at all”). The author personifies his subjects without lapsing into saccharine anthropomorphizing, as when he provides a Gladiator-worthy account of a fox’s battles against other males for the approval of a female in heat (“Before she submitted, teeth had to be sharp, reflexes brisk, endurance endless, desire ablaze”). Elsewhere, Foster discusses eels’ struggle to reproduce amid rising infertility caused by pesticides and a pair of gannet birds’ futile efforts to incubate eggs, whose fatally thin shells likely resulted from the parents’ ingestion of pollutants. 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.

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  • English

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