James Bradley

The Blazing World

Drawing on Stephen J. Pyne’s idea of the Pyrocene, James Bradley explores how this periodisation – the Age of Fire – reframes our relationship with an element that has become an uncontrollable force as well as a figure for our ecological fate.

Full Body Immersion

When we swim we become part of something larger, our bodies part of the tidal flow and movement of water, the great pulse of the planet’s systems, the act of giving ourselves over to the water a form of communion, of embodied connectedness.

The Library at the End of the World

There is no single solution to the climate crisis. But neither is there an inevitable outcome. Both assumptions are forms of magical thinking that obscure much more complicated realities. Coming decades are going to be unimaginably difficult, and

A Family of Disguises

This preoccupation with the secret histories woven through the pages of official histories is signalled by the novel’s unattributed epigraph, ‘most of the great battles are fought in the creases of topographical maps’. It’s an extension of Ondaatj...

An Ocean and an Instant

This quiet dying is all around us. In my childhood summer nights were punctuated by the yips and barks of geckoes, their soft bodies moving across walls, pale in the half-light. I have not seen a gecko in a decade, maybe more.

Made Things: Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne

Writing on the Precipice

'In such a moment, what, one wants to ask, is the purpose of stories?'

Wolf, Hall: The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

Like Hall’s previous novels, The Wolf Border is set in the high, wild border country of Cumbria and is deeply informed by the physical and social textures of the region. At its centre is zoologist Rachel Caine.

The beginning is nigh: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Book of Barely Imagined Beasts... takes the bestiaries of the Middle Ages and uses them as the model for an attempt to tease out the way animals (and the ways we choose to think about them) are integral to our understanding of ourselves and our pl...

Mono no aware: The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

The Crane Wife begins with a moment pitched somewhere between comedy and wonder. In the small hours of the morning, 48-year-old George Duncan is woken unexpectedly. It is a sound that has awoken him – an ‘unearthly sound … a mournful shatter of fr...

Thought Experiments

James Bradley has been one of our country’s most outspoken and prolific commentators on the climate crisis, and his warnings about the environmental devastation that is already locked into the future have started to bite in ways that can no longer...

James Bradley: Fitting the Pieces Together

‘Although it looks like you write one book and then another and then another, the reality is much messier than that, and the books are really part of a larger process that’s surprisingly difficult to understand when you’re in the middle of it.’ Ja...

The catastrophe business: Clade by James Bradley

The first scene in Clade is in Antarctica. It is the summer solstice, ‘the first intimation of the year’s long retreat into the dark’. Adam is a scientist and, in particular, a climate-change researcher. The urgency of this activity is underscored...