Ways to Say Goodbye
On sale
11th March 2027
Price: £18.99
Genre
‘An essential waybook for a bewildered world’ NANCY CAMPBELL, author of Thunderstone and Fifty Words for Snow
‘A powerful and evocative exploration of disaster and collapse, resilience and renewal’ SHAFIK MEGHJI, author of Small Earthquakes
This is not a book about the end of the world – it’s about the start of a new one.
Melting glaciers. Crumbling coasts. Vanishing seas. The feeling that our world is coming to an end has led to a rise in ‘ecological grief’ and prompted a wave of last-chance tourists and environmental mourners. From funeral cairns built for a dying glacier in the Swiss Alps, to selfies taken at the disappearing Aral Sea, pilgrims, both religious and secular, are making journeys to find meaningful ways to say goodbye.
But as one world ends, another begins. In Ways to Say Goodbye, Nick Hunt asks what first chances lie ahead? Travelling across continents, through mountains, forests, deserts, coasts and cities, Nick Hunt captures our landscapes in flux. He explores what it means to live in a world that is undergoing vertiginous change, and offers a way we can keep our balance as the ground shifts beneath our feet.
‘A powerful and evocative exploration of disaster and collapse, resilience and renewal’ SHAFIK MEGHJI, author of Small Earthquakes
This is not a book about the end of the world – it’s about the start of a new one.
Melting glaciers. Crumbling coasts. Vanishing seas. The feeling that our world is coming to an end has led to a rise in ‘ecological grief’ and prompted a wave of last-chance tourists and environmental mourners. From funeral cairns built for a dying glacier in the Swiss Alps, to selfies taken at the disappearing Aral Sea, pilgrims, both religious and secular, are making journeys to find meaningful ways to say goodbye.
But as one world ends, another begins. In Ways to Say Goodbye, Nick Hunt asks what first chances lie ahead? Travelling across continents, through mountains, forests, deserts, coasts and cities, Nick Hunt captures our landscapes in flux. He explores what it means to live in a world that is undergoing vertiginous change, and offers a way we can keep our balance as the ground shifts beneath our feet.
Reviews
A readable book about the climate crisis that isn't preachy or depressing, but somehow manages to tap into a seam of hope, even whilst laying bare the hard truths. Skillfully connecting six disparate landscapes under threat, he takes to the road in the time-honoured fashion - tramping the streets, the deserts, the glaciers and mountains, talking to the people who live, work, love and understand these places, and whose lives are touched by the changes taking place before their very eyes. It is the sheer range of their responses that makes Ways to Say Goodbye so compelling, and often surprising - from the impassioned to the clinical, from the nostalgic to the resigned, we are forced to consider our own reactions in the face of theirs
Sliding deftly between grief and hope, Nick Hunt travels around a range of fragile landscapes, digging into history, myth and present-day concerns to show what they mean today. Written with poetic sensitivity, Ways to Say Goodbye is a beautiful paean to the landscapes we are losing, and a celebration of the places and people that endure
Hunt is the travelling companion you've always wanted: swashbuckling but learned; plangent when the world is dark, but not constitutionally maudlin. And here he's at his best. This is a requiem - solemn but beautiful. And because the universe is strange, hinting always at the possibility of resurrection.
Blazing with intelligence, wise to immensities, and - fleet-footed messenger between worlds - Puckish as well as profound
A powerful and evocative exploration of disaster and collapse, resilience and renewal, spanning expiring glaciers, sinking cities, vanished seas and shifting sand dunes . . . Nick Hunt is a brilliantly original, perceptive and thought-provoking writer
Here's a paradox: a book that is called Ways to Say Goodbye is also a wonderful celebration of renewal. Nick Hunt is an experienced and compassionate guide on these journeys across shifting terrain and into deep time, from eroding coasts to glacial ice and desert forests. Hunt has composed a vital and tender aubade for the Anthropocene, a gathering of wisdom and ritual to ring in an uncertain future. Ways to Say Goodbye is an essential waybook for a bewildered world.
One of the few writers to approach climate change with the moral and emotional urgency and curiosity the issue requires
Ways to Say Goodbye is a bold and unusual attempt to wrestle with our collective anxiety. Far from depressing, Hunt's refusal to look away from all this loss is something of a balm, and his book has an admirable honesty that left me feeling far less alone. Change is inevitable and mystifying but Hunt is the best of guides, refusing to sugarcoat what he learns, while gently encouraging us to also see the possible beginnings in the endings. A brilliant book
Nick Hunt shows that the unravelling of our planet and much that we know is not only an occasion for grieving but also an opportunity for wonder, humour and also transformation. A beautiful book that is not only excellent travel writing but also a moving meditation on being human right now
Nick Hunt explores some of the world's most precious and fragile environments with his trademark deftness, insight and humanity. Though there is melancholy in these pages, it is a captivating and utterly enchanting book
Nick Hunt's writing contains a wealth of pleasures, from the crumbling white cliffs of Southern England, to the glacial melt waters of Switzerland and onward to the spreading sands of the Aral Sea. Ways to Say Goodbye is a compelling meditation on the beautiful planet that we must faster learn to cherish.