Overview

Blending personal memoir with reportage, Surrender is a narrative nonfiction work on the changing landscape of the West and the scavenger, rewilder and ecosexual communities, inspired by a two-year stay in Montana. In the style of Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard, Joanna Pocock, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, explores the changing landscape of the West in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers and catastrophic wild fires.

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9781910695852

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Reviews

'Pocock's prose is understated and spare, and, like a cave painting, does perfect justice to her subject. It doesn't debase the living world by trying to overword it. It is just a sketch, and in its gentleness touches it perfectly ...This is nature writing that we need: standing in contrast to writing that forces the human into the picture as observer, or tries hard to pin the thing down exactly, with alienating expertise or florid description. ... [Pocock's] is a perspective not of objectivity or voyeurism, but of participation in the web of life and in the land and communities as she writes them.' - Abi Andrews, Irish Times 'This is a bewitching and deeply affecting book. Pocock's elegant interweaving of the intimate and the expansive, the personal and the universal, culminates in a work that forces us to consider our own place in, and impact upon, a world that could itself have more past than future.' - Tom Smalley, The Spectator 'Pocock is an environmentalist, yet she is also clearly a humanist. She is always willing to hear people out, no matter how extreme their points of view, and to accept the limits of her own knowledge. ... Pocock's writing is a prism, refracting hidden nuance from her subjects and meaning from memory. ... whether it is climate crisis or midlife crisis, Pocock holds her themes lightly, allowing the fluidity of life to run its course.' - Clare Saxby, Times Literary Supplement 'What makes Pocock's narrative voice so likeable is her frank outsider-ness when encountering some of the more extreme lifestyle choices - both on the political right with the wolf trappers, and on the liberal left with the ecosex earth lovers. She's a city dweller in a monogamous relationship (and not with the earth), a vegetarian - but not a vegan or a paleo-dieter - and someone who can't give up the cinema, bookshops or stable healthcare provision. Further, unlike some of the off-gridders that she encounters who harbour anger and resentment towards mainstream society, Pocock is enthusiastic about the potential for society to change. Her narrative voice becomes an earnest mediator between the extent, nuances and degrees of various modes of life-commitments to environmentalism and the average white middle-class, earth-conscious but ultimately safe liberal lifestyle.' - Baya Simons, Review 31

'Pocock's prose is understated and spare, and, like a cave painting, does perfect justice to her subject. It doesn't debase the living world by trying to overword it. It is just a sketch, and in its gentleness touches it perfectly ...This is nature writing that we need: standing in contrast to writing that forces the human into the picture as observer, or tries hard to pin the thing down exactly, with alienating expertise or florid description. ... [Pocock's] is a perspective not of objectivity or voyeurism, but of participation in the web of life and in the land and communities as she writes them.' - Abi Andrews, Irish Times 'This is a bewitching and deeply affecting book. Pocock's elegant interweaving of the intimate and the expansive, the personal and the universal, culminates in a work that forces us to consider our own place in, and impact upon, a world that could itself have more past than future.' - Tom Smalley, The Spectator 'Pocock is an environmentalist, yet she is also clearly a humanist. She is always willing to hear people out, no matter how extreme their points of view, and to accept the limits of her own knowledge. ... Pocock's writing is a prism, refracting hidden nuance from her subjects and meaning from memory. ... whether it is climate crisis or midlife crisis, Pocock holds her themes lightly, allowing the fluidity of life to run its course.' - Clare Saxby, Times Literary Supplement 'What makes Pocock's narrative voice so likeable is her frank outsider-ness when encountering some of the more extreme lifestyle choices - both on the political right with the wolf trappers, and on the liberal left with the ecosex earth lovers. She's a city dweller in a monogamous relationship (and not with the earth), a vegetarian - but not a vegan or a paleo-dieter - and someone who can't give up the cinema, bookshops or stable healthcare provision. Further, unlike some of the off-gridders that she encounters who harbour anger and resentment towards mainstream society, Pocock is enthusiastic about the potential for society to change. Her narrative voice becomes an earnest mediator between the extent, nuances and degrees of various modes of life-commitments to environmentalism and the average white middle-class, earth-conscious but ultimately safe liberal lifestyle.' - Baya Simons, Review 31

Author Information

Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and on the Dark Mountain blog. She was shortlisted for the Barry Lopez Narrative Nonfiction Prize in 2017, and won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender.

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