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Uncanny and Improbable Events
Uncanny and Improbable Events
Apr 22, 2025 2:23 AM

Author:Amitav Ghosh

Uncanny and Improbable Events

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement.

In this personal and wide-ranging exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, Amitav Ghosh summons writers and novelists to confront the most urgent story of our times.

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Reviews

There is just one question left today for all writers. What would Nature say to us if Nature had a voice? I know of nobody who is facing up to that question with more honesty, courage and commitment than Jay Griffiths

—— John Ashton, independent activist and former UK Climate Change Ambassador

Briskly and breezily, it [12 Bytes] joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers

—— Claire Armitstead , Observer

12 punchy, fact-laden and witty essays... Her writing engulfs you in lucid, fairytale-like realities that take you on gender-bending and time-warped explorations of religion, love, sex, and sexual identity.

—— Charlotte Cripps , Independent

An unusual and entertaining read...[12 Bytes] is inflected with the same delightful, dry humour as the rest of her work... With its imaginative, insightful and wide-ranging essays, 12 Bytes will undoubtedly prompt readers to begin their own circlings around AI.

—— Laura Grace Simpkins , New Scientist

Aspects of this AI future are frightening...[and] for any non-scientist wanting to understand the challenges and possibilities of this brave new world, I can't think of a more engaging place to start.

—— Stephanie Merritt , Observer

Quite brilliant.

—— i

This is, among other things, a very funny book... we are hardly short of dystopias, fictional and otherwise. Winterson's approach is much richer and more fun: a kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories.

—— Steven Poole , Spectator

[Winterson's] essays...are agile, fascinating, richly varied and beautifully idiosyncratic.

—— Joanna Kavenna , Literary Review

Winterson... is always passionate and provocative.

—— Johanna Thomas-Corr , New Statesman

Refreshingly optimistic.

—— Steven Poole , Guardian

Lively, frequently laugh-aloud funny...the 12 essays use a combination of history, literature, religion, science fiction and electronics to extend our mental horizons.

—— Christina Hardyment , The Times, *Audiobooks of the Year*

[Winterson] reflects on the history - and future - of technology in essays that whirr with anarchic intelligence

—— Daily Telegraph

Deep and lovely thinking and writing. (Praise for The Once and Future World)

—— Bill McKibben

MacKinnon is one of the most important ecological writers of our time. (Praise for The Once and Future World)

—— Quill & Quire

'Unique and utterly riveting, Projections braids together three skeins from Karl Deisseroth's life: his painstaking clinical experience as a psychiatrist, dedicated to helping patients; his ingenious inventions in biotechnology that have ushered in waves of new insights into how brains work; and his life as a humble and caring social human being with a gift for crafting a spellbinding chronicle. This is a masterpiece written for each and every one of us'

—— Patricia Churchland, author of Conscience

'Karl Deisseroth is already known around the world as a groundbreaking scientist who has pioneered dazzling new techniques for investigating the brain. In this enthralling masterpiece of a book, he demonstrates that he is also a perceptive psychiatrist, as well as a spellbinding writer who beautifully connects the inner feelings within all human beings to deep insights from modern psychiatry and neuroscience'

—— Robert Lefkowitz, Nobel Laureate and author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm

'We are living during a revolution in our understanding of the human brain, and Karl Deisseroth has been at the forefront of these advances. This magisterial work shows that not only is he one of our leading scientists, but also a gifted writer and storyteller. With precise yet luminous prose, he merges stories of cutting-edge neuroscience with a deep reverence for his patients' humanity'

—— Neil Shubin, author of Some Assembly Required

'Deisseroth writes of heartbreaking and desperate medical cases with a doctor's knowledge, and a novelist's skill for narrative. I could not put this book down'

—— May-Britt Moser, Nobel Laureate

Gorgeous...A personal reckoning that cuts right to the heart. This beautiful novel is an ode-if not an elegy-to an endangered planet and the people and places we love

—— Literary Hub

A good nautical adventure...The Last Migration moves at a fast, exciting clip, motored as much by love for 'creatures that aren't human' as by outrage at their destruction

—— The Wall Street Journal

An ode to our disappearing natural world

—— Newsweek

You can practically hear the glaciers cracking to pieces and the shrill yelps of the circling terns

—— Vulture

There's a brooding lushness to this novel's prose that belies its stark premise... this keening lament of an adventure is compelling.

—— Hephzibah Anderson , Observer

A fascinating hybrid of nature writing and dystopian fiction... gripping... by merging cli-fi and nature writing, the novel powerfully demonstrates the spiritual and emotional costs of environmental destruction

—— The Economist

I’m a sucker for a complicated narrator, and Franny Stone might be the queen of them all. In this tantalizingly beautiful epic, Franny’s life has been marked by secrets and loss, and so she turns to where she cannot reach: the skies

—— Lauren Puckett , Elle US

Gripping, tender and beautifully done. This novel is as intimate as it is urgent—you emerge thrilled and dazed, but also galvanized to save the planet

—— Anna Funder, author of Stasiland

Visceral and haunting...This novel's prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet's landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates...The Last Migration is a nervy and well-crafted novel, one that lingers long after its voyage is over

—— The New York Times Book Review

Dreamy, elegiac... both an adventure story and a piece of speculative climate fiction, constantly slipping between a kind of literary realism and more magical elements, between moments of domestic drama and sweeping epic... an aching and poignant book, and one that's pressing in its timeliness... It's also a book about love, about trying to understand and accept the creatureliness that exists within our selves, and what it means to be a human animal, that we might better accommodate our own wildness within the world.

—— Fiona Wright , Guardian Australia

Gutting and gorgeous, The Last Migration is an astounding meditation on love, trauma, and the cost of survival. With soulful prose and deep empathy, Charlotte McConaghy weaves parallel stories of a woman and a world on the brink of devastation, but never without hope. Equal parts love letter and dirge, this is a true force of a book that I read holding my breath from its start to its symphonic finish

—— Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild

At a time when it feels like we're at the end of the world, this novel about a different kind of end of the world serves as both catharsis and escape

—— Harper's Bazaar US

This novel is enchanting, but not in some safe, fairy-tale sense. Charlotte McConaghy has harnessed the rough magic that sears our souls. I recommend The Last Migration with my whole heart

—— Geraldine Brooks, Author of March

Powerful...Vibrant...Unique... If worry is the staple emotion that most climate fiction evokes in its readers, The Last Migration - the novelistic equivalent of an energizing cold plunge - flutters off into more expansive territory

—— Los Angeles Times

How far do we have to go to escape our pasts and find ourselves? Charlotte McConaghy’s luminous, brilliant novel, set in a future when wildlife is rapidly becoming extinct, is indeed about loss—but what makes it miraculous is that it is also about both the glimpses of hope and the shattering persistence of love, if we are only brave enough to acknowledge them. Written in prose as gorgeous as the crystalline beauty of the Arctic, The Last Migration is deeply moving, haunting, and, yes, important

—— Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

A lovely, haunting novel about a troubled woman’s quest to follow the last surviving Arctic terns on their southerly migration. As she tries to make peace with the ghosts of her painful past, she must choose whether she herself wants – or deserves – to survive, in spite of everything she, and all humans, have destroyed and lost

—— Ceridwen Dovey, author of In the Garden of the Fugitives

This book is a powerful - and entertaining - corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species.

—— Tim Adams , Guardian

Macdonald has a wonderful gift for exploring the intersection between nature and our experience of it, in writing that is both lyrical and impassioned.

—— Hannah Beckerman , Observer

One of the most beautiful memoirs I've ever read. This story will say with you long after you put the book down

—— Emma Gannon

I just turned the last page (reluctantly!). A bold, often brutal exploration of memory, grief and love. Full of hope and heart. I can't recommend it enough

—— Terri White, author of Coming Undone

A brave, brilliant book that is both beautiful and important. Read it then buy it for all your friends

—— Hello!

Gavanndra's memoir The Consequences of Love is absolutely beautiful. It's compelling, heartbreaking, sweet, honest, fascination. I recommend it HIGHLY. I absolutely LOVED it.

—— Marian Keyes

This stunning exploration of grief is so well written and profoundly moving

—— Good Housekeeping

An elegant study of grief and memory

—— Guardian

Hodge pours heartbreak and love into the pages of a book that never pretends to know the answers, and is all the better for it

—— Sunday Times

An eye-opening snapshot of the fashion world in '90s London

—— Vogue UK
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