Sarah Thomas
Tuesday 6th June 2023
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7.10pm
7.30pm
We are thrilled to welcome bookseller favourite, Sarah Thomas, to the bookshop to celebrate paperback publication of her remarkable The Raven's Nest. Described by Robert Macfarlane as 'fascinating', 'lyrical and thoughtful' by Cal Flyn, The Raven's Nest is a profoundly moving meditation on place, identity and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption. This event will be a mix of Q&A and a reading. Inspired by the Icelandic tradition of kvöldvaka, the audience is warmly invited to bring knitting and mending projects to do as Sarah reads.
Visiting Iceland as an anthropologist and film-maker in 2008, Sarah Thomas is spellbound by its otherworldly landscape. An immediate love for this country and for Bjarni, a man she meets there, turns a week-long stay into a transformative half-decade, one which radically alters Sarah's understanding of herself and of the living world.
She embarks on a relationship not only with Bjarni, but with the light, the language, and the old wooden house they make their home. She finds a place where the light of the midwinter full moon reflected by snow can be brighter than daylight, where the earth can tremor at any time, and where the word for echo - bergmál - translates as 'the language of the mountain'. In the midst of crisis both personal and planetary, as her marriage falls apart, Sarah finds inspiration in the artistry of a raven's nest: a home which persists through breaking and reweaving - over and over.
Sarah Thomas is a writer and filmmaker. Her films have been screened internationally, and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain journal. Her writing has also appeared in the Guardian and the anthology Women on Nature edited by Katharine Norbury.