Surfacing - Kathleen Jamie

Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize, 2019"A beautifully produced essay collection that spirals back through interests and themes traced over the past 40 years of Jamie's career, as well as forwards into an unknown future... To read a Jamie essay is to be given a fresh lens through which to view the world." Amanda Bell, Irish TimesUnder the ravishing light of an Alaskan
sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village to
its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline,
impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered.
In a grandmother's disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining
accident and a 'mither who was kind'. In this luminous new essay collection, acclaimed
author Kathleen Jamie visits archeological sites and mines her own memories -
of her grandparents, of youthful travels - to explore what surfaces and what reconnects
us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and
guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children
leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. Surfacing offers a profound sense
of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.