**Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2024 **

**Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2024 **

An extraordinary account of searching for the wildness left in our world – spanning continents and geological eras, mountains and oceans, animals and birds, the skies and the stars beyondWith dizzying acuity and insight, Roberts paints a portrait of a life and its landscapes, creating precious connections with wild creatures and places, from swans in the Cambrian Mountains to wolves in the Pacific Northwest.

By walking at dawn and dusk, in the two lights of awakening and deepening, through the stripped, windswept hills of Wales, and the jungles and savannahs of Africa, he navigates from a soul-stripping sense of loss towards hope in the future. In the presence of wild creatures he finds a way back to life.

PRAISE FOR* TWO LIGHTS 'A beautifully written, wonderfully tender – and ultimately hopeful – journey through all that we stand to lose on this ever-more-challenged Earth' Sharon Blackie, author of If Women Rose Rooted 'Radical and earthy; superlative and sensible… bright, accomplished stuff' Patrick Laurie, author of Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape 'Deeply personal yet always outward looking, James Roberts delights in the world he discovers about him. Yet he also trembles, because he understands like winter light, that world is diminished… and diminishing… Two Lights reveals why all of us should be writers' Robert Minhinnick, poet and author of Diary of the Last Man 'A book about what it means to be fully alive in a time of endings: personal, planetary. Deeply moving and rich in surprising perspectives on wild places and our relationship to them' Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep *

'Evocatively illustrated and elegantly written'Country Life

'A moving meditation on loss and fragility, tenderly tracing a love of wild creatures across landscapes of damaged yet deeply felt meaning. Startling and generous beauty, Two Lights finds light in the wondrous presence of others and the interconnectedness of all living things' Julian Hoffman, author of * Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places*