A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

‘A subject that could not be more important. A compact classic!’ Bill McKibben

‘I learned something new – and found something amazing – on every page’ Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx – whose novels reveal her knowledge and deep concern for the earth – comes an urgent and captivating history of wetlands, their ecological role, and how their loss endangers the planet.

Bogs, muds, marshes, and estuaries are among the earth's most crucial and valuable resources, and in four luminous parts, Proulx chronicles the advent of their systematic destruction in the pursuit of profit and the concomitant release of stored carbon. Full of wide knowledge and temperament, Proulx’s explanation of wetlands takes us to the marshes of 16th century England, the spreads of Canada's Hudson Bay, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and introduces us to the 19th-century adventurers who initiated the destruction of the Amazon.

Proulx was born in the 1930s, an era that, she explains, ‘in the unending name of progress, the Western countries hastily ravaged their own and other nations for minerals, timber, fish, and wildlife.’ Fen, Bog & Swamp is both a revelatory history and an urgent argument for wetland reclamation from a writer whose passionate dedication to monitoring and safeguarding the environment is on full display.

‘Spellbinding, it breathes life into uncharted habitats’ Guardian

‘Proulx’s brilliant book will open your eyes to humanity’s reckless way of destroying wetlands’ Telegraph

‘A haunted tribute … The poetic description of these places and peat is a pleasure to read’ Financial Times

Pages: 208, Dimensions: 14.1x14.1cm