Description

Darkness has shaped the lives of humans for millennia, and in Dark Skies, Tiffany Francis-Baker travels around Britain and Europe to learn more about nocturnal landscapes and humanity’s connection to the night sky.

For a year, Tiffany travels through different nightscapes across the UK and beyond. She experiences 24-hour daylight while swimming in the Gulf of Finland and visits Norway to witness the Northern Lights and speak to people who live in darkness for three months each year. She hikes through the haunted yew forests of Kingley Vale and embarks on a nocturnal sail down the River Dart.

As she travels, Tiffany explores how our relationship with darkness and the night sky has changed over time. In this personal and beautifully written nature memoir, Tiffany Francis-Baker investigates how our experiences of the night-time world have permeated our history, folklore, science, geography, art and literature.

Publisher Review

Tiffany Francis-Baker has gone into the last dark continent, the night, and brought back wondrous tales with starlight in her pen. -- John Lewis-Stempel * Author of Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field * Tiffany Francis-Baker's eloquent and experiential narrative illuminates the shadow filled enclaves of our nocturnal world. -- Joe Harkness * Author of Bird Therapy * Beautifully written...Francis-Baker combines memoir, history and some glorious landscape writing to provide a thoroughly absorbing evaluation of the role of darkness and night in our literature, culture and, most importantly, our environment. -- Charlie Connolly * New European * Rich in literary references, Dark Skies is also rippled through with memoir...it's a warmly personal narrative. -- Suzi Feay * Financial Times * A genuinely inspiring and poetic tale of a year spent exploring the natural world under dark and sometimes star-filled skies. -- Peter Fiennes * Author of Oak and Ash and Thorn *