Author of The Savage Landscape

Cal Flyn recommends...

Recommendations10th May 2026

Earlier this week we had the pleasure of welcoming Cal Flyn to the shop to sign copies of her latest book, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness.

We have been eagerly awaiting publication, so to celebrate the book finally hitting the shelves we have a display on our pillar shelves of some of Flyn’s incredible photography, as well as a selection of titles recommended by the author for where you may want to take your reading journey next.

The Savage Landscape cover

The Savage Landscape

Each of The Savage Landscape’s 10 chapters is loosely structured around a visit to some of the world’s wildest and most invigorating landscapes. In discussing these places, Flyn asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might best be appreciated or preserved.

The Team

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Published: 7th May '26

Format: Hardback

Price: £20.00

The Snow Leopard cover

The Snow Leopard

This classic work of travel writing takes the form of edited diaries from the author's trek into the Nepali Himalayas in the company of the legendary ecologist George Schaller – they were looking for blue sheep, but the snow leopard came to symbolise a form of enlightenment to the writer, a charismatic but troubled man who studied Zen Buddhism with his late wife, recently lost to cancer. Beautiful, truly sublime.

Cal Flyn

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Published: 22nd Jan '98

Format: Paperback

Price: £12.99

The Desert Fathers cover

The Desert Fathers

The Desert Fathers were a loose conglomeration of early Christian ascetics living in the Egyptian deserts. They had no intention of inspiring others – were simply searching for epiphany in the wilderness – but in fact the movement came to influence both eastern and western arms of the Church, including medieval hermits and the Irish missionaries who flung themselves out into the ocean in their coracles. These apopthegmata (sayings) are often cryptic, sometimes strangely comic, and always intriguing.

Cal Flyn

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Published: 27th Mar '03

Format: Paperback

Price: £12.99

The High Seas cover

The High Seas

The ocean is the largest ecosystem on Earth, and certainly the least understood. The legality of its exploitation and protection is also rather complicated. This is a fantastic recent book that really helped me get my head around what is currently at stake – and what it will take to protect marine biodiversity and blue carbon.

Cal Flyn

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Published: 3rd Jul '25

Format: Paperback

Price: £11.99

Lone Wolf cover

Lone Wolf

Adam Weymouth and I have separately grown fascinated by the rebounding populations of carnivores across Europe. I write about wolves and werewolves and woodland in my chapter on the 'crisis of late antiquity' – a time of plagues, economic collapse and large-scale forest regrowth. Adam is more interested in the politics of the present, but it led us both to the Carpathians and conversations with modern-day shepherds and woodsmen.

Cal Flyn

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Published: 29th May '25

Format: Hardback

Price: £18.99

A Field Guide To Getting Lost cover

A Field Guide To Getting Lost

I could have included almost anything by Rebecca Solnit, who has written extensively on ... well, pretty much everything I'm interested in. Her book River of Shadows, about the photographer Edward Muybridge, was a touchstone when I wrote my chapter on Yellowstone and Ansel Adams. But I choose this lyrical book of meditations on uncertainty because I admire its atmosphere and oblique yet beautiful approach more than anything else of hers that I have read.

Cal Flyn

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Published: 5th Jun '25

Format: Paperback

Price: £10.99

Green Hills of Africa cover

Green Hills of Africa

While researching The Savage Landscape, I shadowed a group of trophy hunters as they stalked cape buffalo in Mozambique's spectacular Niassa Special Reserve, one of the largest protected wildernesses in the world. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, conservation derives much of its funding from hunting – a huge ethical quandary. The hunters I met sought the romance of the big-game safari as portrayed by Hemingway in this literary memoir.

Cal Flyn

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Published: 4th Mar '04

Format: Paperback

Price: £9.99

Landscape and Memory cover

Landscape and Memory

My book is two things: a series of thought-provoking adventures in wild places and a cultural history of the idea of wilderness. When we look at nature, we essentially see whatever we expect to see, and the different attitudes to nature in different times and cultures are often so unexpected and interesting to detangle. This book is a modern classic – disentangling environmental history from myth and art history and illuminating it afresh.

Cal Flyn

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Published: 18th Mar '96

Format: Paperback

Price: £35.00