Join Cal Flyn for a discussion of her latest book Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape.

About the Book: In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighborhoods. Exploring extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – Islands of Abandonment give us a glimpse of what nature gets up to when we’re not there to see it.

About the Author: Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. Her first book, Thicker Than Water, was a Times book of the year. Her journalistic writing has been published in Granta, The Sunday Times Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, The Economist and others. She is a columnist for Prospect, deputy editor of literary recommendations site Five Books, and a regular contributor to The Guardian. Cal has been writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library and the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland. She was made a MacDowell fellow in 2019. 

Register for this event directly on Zoom HERE.

This event is being hosted in collaboration with Memorial Hall Library, Billerica Public Library, Chelmsford Public Library, Tewksbury Public Library, and Wilmington Memorial Library.