A haunting journey through the world’s abandoned places, Flyn’s wide-ranging and reflective meditation on how nature continues in humanity’s absence is an eerie yet ultimately optimistic account of ecological diversity. Exploring extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – Islands of Abandonment give us a glimpse of what nature gets up to when we’re not there to see it. By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone? I definitely think nothing can top this for my non fiction reads this year, just wish I had gotten to it.

And yet, Flyn sees the same everywhere; humans leave* and nature comes rushing back in like an unstoppable tide. Author and journalist Cal Flyn explores thirteen such locations and here reports their sights, sounds, and smells. I hope that it will make people focus on the future and when I say the future I mean not next year or the year after but possibly beyond our own generations. Cal Flyn Has recently been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Devoid of self-indulgence or decadent ruin porn, I instead found Islands of Abandonment a thoughtfully written and utterly spellbinding book.

In Detroit, once America's fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. She discusses rapid evolution, such as fish becoming insensitive to PCBs, and coevolution; and how invasive species settling in “ does throw a little cold water on the idea of ecosystems as the intricately wrought, carefully balanced product of millennia of coevolution” (p. She has studied the scientific literature (carefully referenced in endnotes) and acknowledges the input of two scientists.

I was very pleased (though I am, of course, biased) to see her discuss evolution this much—and get it right. But what we need to be thinking about is what are the results in 50 years, and 100 years, what are the results of withdrawing from an area and allowing nature its head? That's what we as humans find very difficult to think about and that we can often be very impatient when we have conservation projects because we want to see results now. These abandoned sites offer many case studies of how our actions affect evolution in animals and plants. Her first book, ‘Thicker Than Water’, was a Times book of the year and dealt with the colonisation of Australia and questions of inherited guilt.

Maybe painstaking is the wrong word, she opines, for it “ implies slow deliberate travel in a single direction. Abandoned places are like magnets to a certain group of people, yet the underground world of urban explorers does not feature in this book. But for me, I need to see that sort of glint of light and and, you know, the plants coming through the cracks in the pavement for me to understand what the route forward is. This is far from a grand tour of the world’s beauty spots; some of Flyn’s destinations are the most damaged on Earth. Abandoned ship scrapyards around New York hide a darker legacy of soil and sludge laced with lethal levels of dioxins, PCBs, and pesticides that is best left undisturbed.