Nemesis, My Friend by Jay Griffiths

‘This brave, angry, kind and wise book holds an extraordinary flourishing of language to help us navigate the abyss. ‘ Anna Fleming, Caught by the River

‘Jay Griffiths is one of the most perceptive and lyrical writers working today, with deep learning and immense moral courage’ John Burnside

‘Jay Griffiths is an original and exciting mind. Her voice is a light beam in the fog of twenty-first century debate.’ Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams

‘Jay Griffiths is such a unique talent and is, in my opinion, one of our greatest and most important writers of this and any other time.’ Ed O’Brien, Radiohead

‘Jay Griffiths is, no question, a major writer, powerful and uncompromising. She writes like four kinds of gorgeous’ Bill McKibben

‘Jay Griffiths’ works are original, inspiring and dare you to search beyond the accepted norm.’ Nikolai Fraiture, The Strokes

‘A bold and innovative writer who’s always exploring new frontiers of thought and feeling and new ways of writing about them. A great stylist, lively and curious, she writes beautifully, about a very wide range of topics. But in every case, she brings something to them that nobody else could bring. And that is Jay Griffiths. She has her feet on the land, and her eyes on the stars.’ George Monbiot

This book tracks the turning light of the day and seasons, an almanac of the turning times. Beginning in night and winter, it moves to dawn and spring, then noon and summer and finally evening and autumn. Set partly at the author’s home in Wales, the book journeys more widely, searching for a dead father in Prague, listening to the Sky-Grandmothers of Mexican myth and staying with the people of West Papua who, when they know they will fall over laughing, lie down first.

It asks: what is the real gift of Nemesis and why is she so misjudged? Why should flowers be prescribed as medicine? What do male zebra finches dream of? Where do the sands of time run fastest, and how is that connected to the age of anxiety?

It explores the dawn chorus; the tradition of sacred hospitality; dust from the time before the sun even existed; the twilight time of the trickster and the daily rituals of morning. In all of these it asks: why does light, through the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, affect us? Because light is how we think.

Hardback, jacket over foiled boards. OUT NOW