Overview

In this vivid blend of memoir, nature writing and ecological thinking, Rebecca Tamás seeks new answers in old folk ways. Suffering from burn-out and grief both environmental and personal, Tamás sets out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions. From a confrontation with the sharp pains of winter at Samhain in Edinburgh to a giddy experience of collective joy at Padstow's May Day, she finds in these traditional practices electric potential for transforming our relationship to the natural world and the flow of time. Intellectually penetrating and richly lyrical, The Book of Mysteries follows the drumbeat of seasonal ritual towards an immersion in the wild time of the earth. Ecstatic, radical and irreverent, this book is a rallying cry to wrest time away from the structures of work and capital, so as to encounter the life-giving mystery of the natural world.

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9781805337683

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Reviews

A wonderfully unmooring passage through a year that connects to life that is deeper, looser, and more true than the tightly wound, unnatural calendars so many of us keep. The Book of Mysteries reminded me of the current that runs beneath everything, and that, if we are open to it, can transform us -- Amina Cain, author of 'Indelicacy'

Author Information

Rebecca Tamás is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her first poetry collection, WITCH (Penned in the Margins, 2019), was a Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Paris Review and Radio 4 Book of the Year, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second collection of poetry, The Fisher King, will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Assembly Press in 2027. She is co-editor, with Sarah Shin, of Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Silver Press, 2025). Rebecca's environmental essay collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman (Makina Books, 2021) was longlisted for The Rathbones Folio Prize, and was a Caught by The River Book of the Month. She was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow, and the recipient of their 2024 Sylvia Canfield Winn Fellowship for Environmental Writing. Rebecca works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City St Georges, University of London.

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