SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2023
LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2022

Reflecting on family, identity and nature, Belonging is a personal memoir about what it is to have and make a home. It is a love letter to nature, especially the northern landscapes of Scotland and the Scots pinewoods of Abernethy - home to standing dead trees known as snags, which support the overall health of the forest.

Belonging is a book about how we are held in thrall to elements of our past. It speaks to the importance of attention and reflection, and will encourage us all to look and observe and ask questions of ourselves.

Beautifully written and featuring Amanda Thomson's artwork and photography throughout, it explores how place, language and family shape us and make us who we are.

"A beautifully written meditation on rural surroundings and her place within them" - * Sunday Times *

"Amanda Thomson's new book manages to carve out a distinctive niche for itself . . . This is a passionate book and infused with a sense of rootedness" - * The Scotsman *

"In recent years rural landscapes have turned into battlegrounds, and nature writing has become increasingly polemical. Belonging is a quiet book of questions in a genre full of answers, but it is all the more powerful and beautiful for this" - * TLS *

"Deservedly shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize; a thoughtful blend of memoir, family history, artistic scrapbook and nature journal in a compelling collage. [ . . . ] There's also an all-encompassing belief in the importance of listening, looking and learning from the world around us" - * Observer *

"Thomson writes of the natural in a way I have yet to encounter before. There is no real hoo-haa, no flowery description of which to speak yet somehow, I came away with that ache inside me - that renewed obsession with the world that is only borne of a very particular kind of writing - poetic, loving, raw . . . Like no other" - * Caught by the River *

"A book that digs deep . . . Vivid" - * Herald *