The Script of the Stones A Short Walk at the End of the World

About this book

The Script of the Stones follows a short walk along the dramatic clifftops of Gower, South Wales – a journey of barely half a mile that becomes an expansive meditation on nature, memory, and loss. Drawing on a lifetime's intimacy with this landscape, Francis Gooding explores rockpools and limestone strata, traces the movements of choughs and adders, and examines everything from slugs to geological deep time.

In our age of environmental uncertainty, Gooding confronts how knowledge of climate change has destabilised our relationship with the natural world. Part elegy, part celebration, The Script of the Stones weaves together family history and the wonder of the minuscule to paint a portrait of a world that exists before, during and after us – a world that will endure.

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Biography

Francis Gooding is a contributing editor at the journal Critical Quarterly and has published academically in numerous areas, including philosophy of history, art history, popular music, film, and colonial history. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books on nature-related subjects, and has been a regular columnist and feature writer on music for The Wire since 2014 and as an art critic for Time Out. He is a lecturer at Birkbeck College and has taught widely on film and on the British Empire in the UK, US, Europe and India.