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Author: Kirsteen McNish
Genres: Literary Memoir, Nature and Place Writing
When Kirsteen McNish leaves London after twenty years for a life on Dartmoor, it is her young daughter, Juniper, who becomes her guide. Watching Juniper meet the world hand first, nose first, skin first, McNish begins to notice how far she has drifted from that kind of attention, and sets out to find her way back to it.
THE UNFOLDING is structured not by chronology but by sense, moving between the landscapes that have shaped her: sight in Kirkcudbright, touch in Nottingham, sound in Corby, smell in Skipsea and Gairloch, taste in Cornwall and Dartmoor, with the River Dart running through as setting and companion. Threaded through is the death of her mother, an event that reorders how McNish experiences her own senses, and how she watches Juniper experience hers.
Resisting easy categorisation as nature writing, this is a book about grief, motherhood and rebuilding a life outside a city that held her for two decades, and about learning, through a child, to notice again.
For readers of Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk, Kat Lister's Elements, Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat, and Lucy Jones's Matrescence.
Author: Kirsteen McNish
Genres: Literary Memoir, Nature and Place Writing
When Kirsteen McNish leaves London after twenty years for a life on Dartmoor, it is her young daughter, Juniper, who becomes her guide. Watching Juniper meet the world hand first, nose first, skin first, McNish begins to notice how far she has drifted from that kind of attention, and sets out to find her way back to it.
THE UNFOLDING is structured not by chronology but by sense, moving between the landscapes that have shaped her: sight in Kirkcudbright, touch in Nottingham, sound in Corby, smell in Skipsea and Gairloch, taste in Cornwall and Dartmoor, with the River Dart running through as setting and companion. Threaded through is the death of her mother, an event that reorders how McNish experiences her own senses, and how she watches Juniper experience hers.
Resisting easy categorisation as nature writing, this is a book about grief, motherhood and rebuilding a life outside a city that held her for two decades, and about learning, through a child, to notice again.
For readers of Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk, Kat Lister's Elements, Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat, and Lucy Jones's Matrescence.