A visionary and timely novel about a world out of balance by the prizewinning author of The WakeWhen Swans return, Alexandria will fall.One thousand years from now, a small religious community lives in what were once the fens of eastern England. They are perhaps the world's last human survivors. Now they find themselves stalked by a force that draws ever closer, and that seems to have brought them to the brink of extinction. A force that offers them a promise and a threat: a place called Alexandria.Set in a time on the far side of an apocalypse, and perhaps on the verge of another, Paul Kingsnorth's radical new novel is a work of matchless, mythic imagination. It is driven by elemental themes: community versus the self, the mind versus the body, machine over man—and the tension between an unstable present and an unknown, unknowable future. Alexandria is the rousing conclusion to an extraordinary fiction project that began with...

It could turn out to be the biggest political movement of the twenty-first century: a global coalition of millions, united in resisting an out-of-control global economy, and already building alternatives to it. It emerged in Mexico in 1994, when the Zapatista rebels rose up in defiance of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The West first noticed it in Seattle in 1999, when the World Trade Organisation was stopped in its tracks by 50,000 protesters. Since then, it has flowered all over the world, every month of every year. The 'anti-capitalist' street protests we see in the media are only the tip of its iceberg. It aims to shake the foundations of the global economy, and change the course of history.But what exactly is it? Who is involved, what do they want, and how do they aim to get it? To find out, Paul Kingsnorth travelled across four continents to visit some of the epicentres of the movement. In the process, he was tear-gassed on the streets of Genoa, painted...

* Chicago Tribune "Fall literary preview: books you need to read now"* Vulture "The Best and Biggest Books to Read This Fall"NORTH AMERICAN EDITION: After moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expects to find contentment. It is the goal he has sought — to nest, to find home — after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he finds that his tools as a writer are failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself.Informed by his experiences with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world — or are they part of the great lie which is killing it?

Historical fiction in old English

The stunning new novel from the prize-winning author of The Wake.'Come to a place like this . . . and you will understand soon enough that this world is a great animal, alive and breathing.'Beast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on a west-country moor. What he has left behind we don't yet know; what he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements and with something he begins to see in the margins of his vision: some creature that is tracking him, the pursuit of which will become an obsession.This is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage and the search for truth. Short, shocking and exhilarating, it confirms Paul Kingsnorth as one of our most daring and rewarding contemporary writers.

A provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live with hope in "an age of ecocide"Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist—an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on "sustainability" rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change.Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth's thinking....