The Book of Mysteries

<p><b>'Insightful and bracin a personal and political journey through the seasons' Melissa Harrison, author of <i>All Among the Barley</i></b></p><p><b>'A wonderfully unmooring passage through a year that connects to life that is deeper, looser, and more true than the tightly wound, unnatural calendars so many of us keep' Amina Cain, author of <i>Indelicacy</i></b></p><p><b>'This book is a precious and life-affirming gift to our hearts and intellects' Rebecca May Johnson, author of <i>Small Fires</i></b></p><p>At festive gatherings celebrating summer's peak, in reflective moments as winter gave way, Rebecca Tamás began to hear another rhythm. A faint hint that, underneath the rush of clocks and calendars, another, richer kind of time might exist.</p><p>As she suffered from grief and burnout, Tamás sought a deeper connection to the movement of the seasons through an immersion in old folkways. She set out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions. From a confrontation with the sharp pains of winter at Samhain in Edinburgh to a giddy experience of collective joy at Padstow's May Day, she found in these traditional practices electric potential for transforming our relationship to the natural world.<p><p>Intellectually penetrating and richly lyrical, <i>The Book of Mysteries</i> follows the drumbeat of seasonal ritual towards an immersion in the wild time of the earth. Ecstatic, radical and irreverent, this book is a rallying cry to wrest time away from the structures of work and capital, so as to encounter the life-giving mystery of the natural world.</p>