Description

Penguin, paperback

Publication Date:September 24, 2019

Publisher Marketing: “[Kathleen Jamie’s] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over — not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth’s, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest.” –Delia Owens, author ofWhere the Crawdads Sing,“By the Book” inThe New York Times Book Review.

An immersive exploration of time and place in a shrinking world, from the award-winning author ofSightlines.

In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup’ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose,Surfacingoffers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.