Jay Griffiths

From celebrated author Jay Griffiths comes a unique and heartfelt insight into the healing nature of our relationship with animals Pet-owners and animal-lovers instinctively know that animals heal. This book offers the evidence, drawing widely on scientific discoveries, history, and Indigenous knowledge. We meet a pot-bellied pig who saved her owner's life, lions who guarded a girl from kidnappers, dolphins and whales rescuing people in danger, and dogs who can smell cancer and phone the Emergency Services. Animal sounds, from insects to birdsong and the purring of cats, are directly medicinal and their presence can heal the pain of loneliness. Animals, including donkeys, can be natural therapists for the hurt psyche, alleviating trauma, fear and depression. In this original, revelatory and exuberant book, Jay Griffiths explores how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective, guiding us in how we might create societies that are healthier, fairer and kinder. Wolves may be teachers of ethics; monkeys and dogs can object to unfairness and bees take collective decisions. Animals are irresistible medicine for a healthy culture, animating the arts with spectacular vitality and verve, as poetry knows. Open-hearted, playful and wise, How Animals Heal Us puts animals at the heart of a restorative vision of health.

Why rebel? Because our footprint on the Earth has never mattered more than now. How we treat it, in the spirit of gift or of theft, has never been more important. Because we need a politics of kindness, but the very opposite is on the rise. Libertarian fascism, with its triumphal brutalism, its racism and misogyny - a politics that loathes the living world. Because nature is not a hobby. It is the life on which we depend, as Indigenous societies have never forgotten. Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars, and they are lining up now to write rebellion across the skies. From the author of Wild, this passionate, poetic manifesto for urgent rebellion is also a paean to the deep and extraordinary beauty of the natural world. 'Jay's writing has reduced me to hot throbs of grief; through beauty and subtlety, to the depths of the hurt of these times . . . and what a liberation to express this, to free the space in my chest to feel the love that propels me forwards.' Gail Bradbrook 'Chewy, erudite, filled with swing: this is a dazzling book, urgent without ever being worthy, a book that crackles. Why Rebel is a Tardis, to read it is to enter the massive, a deep interior that hydrates vocation in a time of trouble.' Martin Shaw

A stark and lyrical account of the psyche in crisis from the author of Kith Tristimania tells the story of a devastating year-long episode of manic depression, culminating in a long solo pilgrimage across Spain. Recording the experience of mania as has rarely been done before, Jay Griffiths shows how the condition is at once terrifying and also profoundly creative, both tricking and treating the psyche. An intimate and raw journey, Tristimania illuminates something of the universal human spirit.