Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (Hardcover)
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July 2019 Indie Next List
“Margaret Renkl feels the lives and struggles of each creature that enters her yard as keenly as she feels the paths followed by her mother, grandmother, her people. Learning to accept the sometimes harsh, always lush natural world may crack open a window to acceptance of our own losses. In Late Migrations, we welcome new life, mourn its passing, and honor it along the way.”
— Kat Baird, The Book Bin (Corvallis), Corvallis, OR
Staff Reviews
If you don’t know Margaret Renkl from her fabulous NYT op-eds, then you’ll soon know her for this collection of beautifully written personal essays. Renkl lives here in Nashville, but the buzz on this book is national. If you have lived through the loss of a loved one, or are moved by the natural world in unexpected ways, I dare you to pick up this book. You will not put it down.
— KarenNamed a Best Book of the Year by New Statesman, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Washington Independent Review of Books
Southern Book Prize Finalist
From New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family--and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.
Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents--her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father--and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child's transition to caregiver.
And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds--the natural one and our own--"the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love's own twin."
Gorgeously illustrated by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.