Hachette, Australia, 2026
Cover design Alex Ross Creative
Cover art courtesy Alamy/Steve-x-art; Alamy/The Natural History Museum; Shutterstock/Maomi Marcin
Inga Simpson’s writing about the natural world is so very beautiful that for me the purity of her language acts as a kind of counterweight to the darkness of her storytelling.
The 12 stories in this collection are not exactly sequential, but they are held together by strong thematic threads and all point determinedly to the concept of fragility – fragility of the environment, of our relationships with one another and our relationships as human beings with and in nature.
As her characters struggle with their own mortality and the destruction of the planet on a macro and micro scale, we travel deep into the wilderness and the oceans with their capacity to heal us and/or envelop us, to provide an answer to the dilemmas of human existence, to provide escape and revelation.
This sounds a little lofty, but the stories themselves are earthy, awash with human anguish, love, loss, separation, dislocation and conflict, moral and other. Here we have the endless search for a lost beloved, environmental activism (grief for the land), prickly unsatisfying relationships, the artist’s quest for the perfect image paralleled with the surfer’s quest for the perfect wave, the relative value of human and animal life, the ever increasing gap between humankind and the natural world and yet the insistent evidence that we are still wildlife, or at least vestiges of it.
The author’s persistent call to the reader is to find those natural ties, that sense that ‘once we were forest’ and to acknowledge our destructiveness of our Mother Earth. It’s an apocalyptic vision that this work suggests, but one not too far from the reality of our present world. As the book leads us to its end story, we are seen very much as interlopers into a natural order, as beings that the Earth has accepted in all our prodigality.
This is an intense work, exhaling the restless energy of the writer to understand the voices of the natural world, and then to be one with it, rather than a mere consuming visitor on its surfaces. Her human characters are at best uncertain in their place, struggling to do their best in flawed situations, sacrificing themselves to inconclusive causes and relationships.
In the story Tanglefoot, old school large format photographer Tone pursues the images made of a disappeared wilderness, photographs by those who came before her (the author’s reverential nod to Dombrovskis and Truchanas), feeling their majesty like a memory.
The irony of her loss, the identification of her ‘self’ with her work, the compulsion to reclaim perfection through image and to sacrifice all for the experience of being one with the forest – these are heart-stopping metaphors for the human condition, and take us back again to that reference in The Wash to the nature of longing: ‘that particular yearning that surfers and artists knew…perfect in the imagining – just over the horizon’ (page 9).
This is a book for reading and rereading. In one reading we will miss too much. And none of it should be missed.
Thank you to Hachette for my review copy and to Inga for speaking with me about the writing of this collection, about the state of the world and about ways of being.