Latitudes Encounters with a Changing Planet

“McNeil’s deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It’s captivating stuff.” Publishers Weekly

“Meditative and sumptuous… Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change.” Foreword Reviews

“Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect.” Julia Bell, author of Massive and Hymnal

“Her shimmering prose brings into sharp focus the beauty of the remote places where we can glimpse – and sometimes hear – what our planet was like before us. And what it might be in the silence that will come after the frenzy of human dominance.” Margie Orford

“This one has knocked me sideways: it’s, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I’ve read this year.” Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio

Relating thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world’s last remaining wild places, Latitudes is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of a changing planet. At once memoir, journal and travelogue of Earth’s wildernesses, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada.

Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer’s life-long experience of reckoning with an age of dramatic ecological loss. It shows us the importance of listening to the living world that is speaking to us, if we open ourselves to hear its voice.