Book of the Month: The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn

We are wildly excited to be able to offer you the chance to win a copy of Cal Flyn's new book The Savage Landscape, in partnership with William Collins.

To be in with a chance of winning this book about the world's wildest and most invigorating landscapes and our relationship with the natural world, please answer the question at the bottom of this page by 11.59pm on 31 May 2026.

All entrants must reside in the UK and full terms and conditions apply.

Check out our competitions page to find more giveaways.

About The Savage Landscape

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Islands of Abandonment comes a new book about our relationship to the natural world.

This book takes us into the wild – deep into dark forests, to the top of mountains and into the heart of deserts. It addresses our deep yearnings to be awed and inspired by landscapes that remain beyond our reach and examines what nature gets up to in the absence of humans.

In ten chapters, each loosely structured around a visit to some of the world’s wildest and most invigorating landscapes, the book asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might best be appreciated or preserved.

These locations have been chosen for their physical beauty, their perceived isolation, and the moral or emotional complexity of the human stories that can be found there. In this search for wilderness, we will meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds seeing off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.

Q&A with Cal Flyn

What can readers expect from The Savage Landscape?

The Savage Landscape is two things: firstly, it’s an account of a series of adventures in some of the world’s most rugged and isolated places - from the Amazon to the Antarctica via the Himalayas and the Sinai Desert and many others in between. And on my way, I tell the history of wilderness – as an idea or a concept – and how that idea has changed over the centuries from spiritual threshold to aesthetic ideal and thence to (an increasingly contested) conservation goal.

How do you choose what to read?

I follow my nose! While working, curiosity leads me down many rabbit holes and I’ll primarily be reading nonfiction, academic texts and journal articles. I read a lot of fiction for ‘fun’ or fulfilment. A varied diet is crucial.

What was your favourite book as a youngster?

I was an omnivorous reader always, but the book I loved most was probably Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island, in which three orphaned siblings and a very practical friend run away to live on an uninhabited island. They sleep on heather and eat from cans and drink spring water and catch their own fish – heavenly.

How do you get out of a reading slump?

I just ask myself: what do you want to read? And answer it honestly. Not what I think I should read, not what’s on my to-do list, but what would actually be a treat. If I’m really struggling to think of anything, I seek out a poetry book I’ve never read and flip through until I find a page that blows my head off. That’ll do it.

What's your favourite place to read?

My best reading is invariably done on a train, plane or bus. I am achieving something by sitting still, so I can relax and sink into whatever I’m reading for as long as I’m captive.

What's the last great book you read?

I was fascinated by T. J. Jackson Lear’s No Place of Grace, a history of what he called ‘Antimodernism’ – essentially the late 19th/20th century kickback against comfort and capitalism in the United States; related figures include John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt and the Transcendentalists, who suggested we need to toughen ourselves or find epiphany via trial in nature. I recognised so many contemporary currents of thought.