Book Signing – Nancy Campbell

Nancy Campbell will be here to sign copies of her non-fiction works: ‘Thunderstone’, ‘Fifty Words for Snow’ and ‘The Library of Ice’. (For more info on the books, see below.) She will also be reading from her poetry works in The Folly in the evening.

Thunderstone

‘It was believed lightning would not strike a house that held a thunderstone. And so these fossils were placed on top of clocks, under floorboards, over stable doors. But there are some storms that thunderstones cannot prevent.’ In the wake of a traumatic lockdown, Nancy Campbell buys an old caravan and drives it into a strip of neglected woodland between a canal and railway.

It is the first home she has ever owned. As summer begins, Nancy embraces the challenge of how to live well in a space in which possessions and emotions often threaten to tumble – clearing industrial junk from the soil to help wild beauty flourish. But when illness and uncertainty loom once more, it is this van anchored in the woods, and the unconventional friendships forged off -grid, that will bring her solace and hope.

An intimate journal across the space of a defining summer, Thunderstone is celebration of the people and places that hold us when the storms gather; an invitation to approach life with imagination and to embrace change bravely.

Fifty Words for Snow

Snow. Every language has its own words for the magical, mesmerising flakes that fall from the sky. In this exquisite exploration, writer and Arctic traveller Nancy Campbell digs deep into the meanings of fifty words for snow.

In Japanese we encounter yuki-onna – a ‘snow woman’ who drifts through the frosted land. In Icelandic it is hundslappadrifa – ‘snowflakes as big as a dog’s paw’ – that softly blanket the streets. And in Maori we meet Huka-rere – ‘one of the children of rain and wind’.

From mountain tops and frozen seas to city parks and desert hills, each of these linguistic snow crystals offers a whole world of myth and story – the perfect winter gift.

The Library of Ice

A vivid and perceptive book combining memoir, scientific and cultural history with a bewitching account of landscape and place, which will appeal to readers of Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin and Olivia Laing.

Long captivated by the solid yet impermanent nature of ice, by its stark, rugged beauty, acclaimed poet and writer Nancy Campbell sets out from the world’s northernmost museum – at Upernavik in Greenland – to explore it in all its facets. From the Bodleian Library archives to the traces left by the great polar expeditions, from remote Arctic settlements to the ice houses of Calcutta, she examines the impact of ice on our lives at a time when it is itself under threat from climate change. The Library of Ice is a fascinating and beautifully rendered evocation of the interplay of people and their environment on a fragile planet, and of a writer’s quest to define the value of her work in a disappearing landscape.