Jay Griffiths - A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World

A COUNTRY CALLED CHILDHOOD

Praise for Jay Griffiths

Wild: An Elemental Journey

Wild is like nothing else Ive ever read: thrilling, troubling, frightening, exhilarating. Jay Griffiths courage and energy are formidable, but so is her sheer intelligence and literary flair. This is a truly necessary book, and we are all lucky that the subject found a writer worthy of it Philip Pullman

Wild is part travelogue, part call to arms and wholly original... it is probably poetry that comes closest to defining this undefinable and untameable work. A vital, unique and uncategorizable celebration of the spirit of life wherever it is found, Wild is a profound and extraordinary piece of work Observer

Wild is an astonishing piece of writing, truly medicinal, beautiful, passionate and raw Ed OBrien, Radiohead

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

It is the intellectual immersion that really distinguishes her book; her use of etymology to reach into the core of a cultural vision is unsurpassed. The result is a paean, a threnody, a work of great sadness and great joy Independent

Wild is a breathtaking book, in its range and in its shameless passion: it reads like an entirely new genre Don Paterson

Its as though, arm in arm, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas went out to find the deep meaning of wilderness Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald

Incandescent, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, Wild is sensuous, cocky, magnificent, liberating, explosive and exciting. With Joycean word-play, meticulous scholarship, ironic wit, crafted cadences, Wild is a profoundly important contribution, a raging oratorio Richard Mabey, The Times

Passionate, rigorous and utterly honest, Griffiths remarkable book is written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject Robert Macfarlane

There is no getting away from the books brilliance Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times

Wild is a song of delight, and a cry of warning, poetic, erudite and insistent. A restless, unstintingly generous performance, it carries the mark of true intellectual and spiritual passion Jonathan Gibbs, Independent on Sunday

A major book by a major writer Bill McKibben

An utter wonder of a book, vulnerable, ferocious and elegiac, luminously awake, politically astute, Wild is the expression of a uniquely capacious intelligence David Abram

A strange, utterly compelling book, Wild is easily the best, most rewarding travel book that I have read in the last decade Mark Cocker, Guardian

Insightful, effervescent and lavishly written. She shrouds her amazingly strenuous physical journey with a rich literary penumbra. The book has a profusion of historical allusions and a fertile bibliography; the vivid, excited writing draws haunting, lovely connections among multiple cultures, landscapes and ideas Ruth Padel, Washington Post

She operates shamanically, making a series of remarkable journeys through cultures, conflicts and language, and she returns with the wisdom of profoundly lived experience. Wild is radical in the original, etymological sense. It goes to the root of the problem and it sings its way there Time Out Book of the Week

Remarkable, impassioned, exhilarating, high-risk stuff, thrumming with unbridled erotic charge, a geographical and emotional journey of extraordinary range Jeremy Seal, Sunday Telegraph

A disobedient book, breathtakingly honest, rich and textured, challenging and poetic Jules Pretty, The Times Higher Educational Supplement

With a dazzling gift and fascination for language, this is a hungry, brave, all-consuming book, jumping with life Adam Nicolson, Spectator

If bravery itself could write, it would write like she does John Berger

Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time

An exercise indeed in Dharma, poetry and philosophy Gary Snyder

This is smart, edgy work, from an original and exciting mind. Jay Griffiths voice is a light beam in the fog of twenty-first-century debate Barry Lopez

A fascinating, highly original meditation on time Fritjof Capra

A thoughtful, original and intuitive account of how we perceive time which offers many alternative chronological considerations... amusing and erudite, fascinating and spirited. Bravo! Peter Reading, The Times Literary Supplement

A wonderful, delightfully humorous polemic against everything thats wrong with the way we deal with time today Independent, Books of the Year

An irresistibly provocative and political analysis of time. Her wittily enthusiastic thesis is that time has too long been used as a tool to power: as a manifesto, it could cause a revolution The Times, Books of the Year

Griffiths does for time what Robert M. Pirsig did for truth-obsessed philosophy in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceTime Out

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon

A stunning allegory about love, art and revolution. She makes every word, every scene, in this passionate narrative count. Its brilliant work Barry Lopez

Jay Griffiths is a fearless adventurer with words and images. I salute her courage and the splendour of this vision Philip Pullman

Griffiths writing is utterly original Northern Rivers Echo

Through Griffiths we hear the voice of Frida Kahlo herself, as if she were speaking directly to us. Its like reading poetry inside a great biographical novel. I absolutely devoured this wonderfully perceptive and sensitive book Marie Darrieussecq

Rich, honed and intense, a fierce, compelling homage The Age, Australia

Imagine being held in the open hand of moonlight and carried through a dream into day. This is what it is like to read A Love Letter from a Stray Moon. I am transported and transformed; I feel lucky to have read it and it leaves me in awe Lemn Sissay

Griffiths has a formidable mind Sun-Herald, Australia

A rapturous, crazy and gorgeous poem. It is a love song to life, to art and to the human spirit Alice Nelson, West Australian

By the same author

NON-FICTION

Wild: An Elemental Journey

Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time

FICTION

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon

Anarchipelago

Copyright Jay Griffiths, 2014

First published 2013 in Great Britian by Hamish Hamilton, part of the Penguin Group, UK

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

eBook ISBN 978-1-61902-403-8

Cover design by Gerilyn Attebery

Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

Set in 12.5/16pt Fournier MT Std

COUNTERPOINT

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Distributed by Publishers Group West

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CONTENTS

While I was travelling for my last book, Wild, I encountered a deep riddle: a difficult riddle. It stuck in my teeth like a string of celery. I teased at it with my tongue and my fingertips played on it. Like all good riddles, it was tricky but glimpsable and, more than anything, it told me it was worth solving.