Quite the most enchanting travel writing I have read for a long time. Her eye for detail and passages about the ordinary and the unexpected are so alive, clear, haunting and lyrically beautiful, I felt I should pack my bags and go to Scotland immediately. But then really Kathleen could make anywhere enticingly wondrous. A perfect gem, it has been produced as a ‘deluxe’ paperback with flaps.
It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Kathleen Jamie, award-winning poet, has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer. Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.
Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her poetry collection The Tree House (Picador, 2004), won both the Forward Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead was shortlisted for the 2003 International Griffin Prize. Kathleen Jamie’s non-fiction books include the highly regarded Findings and Sightlines. She is Chair of Creative Writing at Stirling University, and lives with her family in Fife.
