“Savage Gods is a beautiful, intelligent, extremely poetic book about a writer dissecting his thoughts and feelings on the page without the protective layer of fiction.”
—Gabino Iglesias, NPR
“Like all the best books, [Savage Gods is] a wail sent up from the heart of one of the intractable problems of the human condition: real change comes only from crisis, and crisis always involves loss… There are few writers as raw or brave on the page. Savage Gods is an important book.”
—Ellie Robins, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Paul Kingsnorth’s vision is both so compelling and so completely one-of-a-kind… Savage Gods [is] something of a throwback to the romantic cultures of a pre-modern world, and a lesson in what happens when those old gods are exhumed in an age when Nature becomes slave to Man, when customs give way to chaos, and the words we use to make sense of it all have lost their meanings.”
—Josh Allan, Full Stop
“The most incredible book I read this year was Paul Kingsnorth’s Savage Gods, a dramatic self-accounting that explodes ‘nature writing’ to strain at the limits of language itself. Kingsnorth charts the breakdown of his faith in words, in nature as an uncomplicated restorative, in the idea of ‘progress’, while fearlessly tracking his conclusions to their very ends. This is a writer—and a writer that burns—attempting to cure himself of writing, on the page, and it leads to some profound, and just as often jaw-dropping, insights.”
—David Keenan, The Guardian
“How often do we get an environmental activist and poet—who once worked undercover in West Papua New Guinea, who has been cited by figures as diverse as David Cameron and Mark Rylance, and who believes ‘[s]ocial media is like a giant communal toilet’—confronting the failure of language and civilization in 142 pages?”
—Molly Young, Vulture
“What can nature teach us about ourselves? For English writer Paul Kingsnorth, moving his family to a small farm in Ireland illuminated a sense of disconnection. He wrestles with language, land and rootlessness in Savage Gods.”
—Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
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