Savage Gods

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, ‘Best Books of 2019’

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.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Kingsnorth’s troublesome words do an unexpectedly moving job of capturing the problem of being, and of writing about it.
The Spectator

What ultimately makes Savage Gods a success is Kingsnorth’s passion. His honest probing of himself is the real strength of this book. He is a man bearing everything. And for all the confessional memoirs so popular at the moment, this is the real deal.
The American Conservative

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Savage Gods is a confessional: a short, sharp, unexpected account of a crisis in my own writing, in my sense of purpose and my sense of home. It is an examination, from within the moment, of what it means to lose faith in words. In the process, it asks: what is the meaning of language and what is it for? Does writing illuminate or conceal? And can a human ever really ‘belong’ to a place in a broken world which militates against it?

Little Toller (UK), Two Dollar Radio (US), 2019.

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