| Land Beneath the Waves |Nic Wilson | Summerdale Publishers | 2025 | Hardback | 314 Pages | No Illustrations | ISBN: 9781837996223 |
The Publisher’s View:
About this book
A moving, honest and revealing memoir of living with chronic illness, and an examination of the ways a relationship with the natural world can affect us, from debut author and nature writer Nic Wilson
When Nic Wilson begins researching the history of her local landscape and its wildlife, the last thing she wants to do is consider her own past. But as she unearths tales of giant sequoias, puss moths, nightingales and chalk streams, Nic realises her affinity with the nearby wild began as a way to handle growing up with a mother who lived with a debilitating chronic illness.
Now in her forties, and struggling with mental and physical health herself, Nic revisits her childhood to trace the influence of the natural world on her life. As she grapples with revelations from the past, the boundaries between self and land become increasingly porous, and the lure of the wetlands around her home threatens to engulf her. Can she find the strength to face the waves of chronic illness – past and present – and learn to reach for steady ground?
With the natural world facing more threats than ever before, Land Beneath the Waves inspires us to develop a meaningful bond with our local natural spaces and landscapes, illuminating a hopeful path towards a better future for human and non-human life.
Other Views
A great many reviews are gushing about this book… below just a handful that set the tone…
“Both ordinary and profound, Land Beneath the Waves charts a process most of us never manage: to give a true account of ourselves. It’s also an illuminating testimony of chronic illness, one that fellow sufferers will recognise and the rest of us can only be enlarged by.”
– Melissa Harrison, novelist, nature writer and children’s author
“A beautiful, moving memoir highlighting the amazing relationships humans have with the natural world, and what they mean for us.”
– Kate Bradbury, author, journalist and TV presenter
“A deeply honest, forensically detailed account of a life blighted by ill-health, yet redeemed by a profound connection with nature – a delight to read.”
– Stephen Moss, author and naturalist
The Author: Nic Wilson is a writer, editor and Guardian country diarist. Having taught A Level English for 12 years, she now works freelance for BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Under the Changing Skies: The Best of The Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 (2024), Going to Ground: An Anthology of Nature and Place (2024), Moving Mountains: Writing Nature through Illness and Disability (2023) and Women on Nature (2021). Land Beneath the Waves is her first book.
Fatbirder View:
Those of us with chronic illness, especially invisible ones, somehow have to learn to live with it. For some its denial, for others a never-ending search for cures and nostrums, for others it’s about distraction. I guess I’m in the latter category now, but have probably journeyed through all the others too.
Nic’s book was in itself a journey away from denial, ever hopeful of help and eventually into an acceptance of the process; the journey and the distraction. Having also been saved from self-pity and fruitless searching by nature, I feel the parallels. Our paths have taken many disparate twists, but there are also many shared ones too. Fifty years into my journey I was told, for the first time, that one of my chronic illnesses’ symptoms was fatigue. However, it was never the crushing weight that Nic has suffered, nor is mine generational. I have rarely had to take to my bed, but pain as a constant companion I do understand.
During that pain I think I’ve clutched a more metaphorical hagstone than Nic, but I can well understand how that physical manifestation of mother earth can be the lifeline.
Nature’s purpose is not to cure us, but it certainly is a medicine I’ve depended on my whole life, so I can understand why Nic has sometimes used her last shred of strength to be in its embrace.
There will be other readers who feel the journey by virtue of having travelled some of those paths, but there will be many more for whom this book is a revelation.
Whoever the reader is, they will be uplifted by the words, the poetry in the wildworld that Nic shares.
If there was just one notion that I think everyone should take away from this, it is late on in the book, when Nic has dragged herself out to the Alder Carr before her body was really ready. Forced into a pace slowed by fatigue, she finds that a slow step reveals even more of detail and depth.
The book carries important messages, but let those creep in like bird song, instead just enjoy her writing style and then pictures she paints along the way.
Fatbirder
The paperback is out next month:
Land Beneath the Waves a book by Nic Wilson – Bookshop.org UK