Stones of Aran: Labyrinth [Paperback]

Tim Robinson’sStones of Aranis one of the most striking and original literary undertakings of our time. Robinson’s ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape, know it as extensively and intimately as possible, and what it takes to make that knowledge, the sense of the landscape itself, come alive in writing. It is a project that draws on the legacies of Thoreau and Joyce, to which Robinson brings his own polymathic gifts as cartographer, mathematician, historian, and, above all, shaper of words.

InPilgrimageRobinson walked the entire coast of Airann, largest of the Aran islands. InLabyrinthhe turns in to the island’s interior. These two books—parts of an inseparable whole that can, for all that, be read quite separately from each other—constitute a vast polyphonic composition, at once encyclopedic and lyrical, scientific and surprisingly personal. Exploring the illimitable complexity and bounty contained in the seemingly limited confines of a single island, Robinson invites us to look without and within and to see the wonder of the world.“I do not believe there is another book in the world like it. . . . Robinson has achieved the impossible: by taking a geographical reality, describing it so meticulously, and embedding it in a past of folktales, legends, and history he has thwarted the transience of at least one small part of the globe.”
—Cees Nooteboom

“One of the most sustained, intensive, and imaginative studies of a landscape that has ever been carried out. . . . As with all great landscape works, it is at once territorially specific and utterly mythic.”
—Robert Macfarlane

"A loving anatomy of the largest of the Aran Islands off the West Coast of Ireland, in which the point where nature and culture meet in the island is observed with great beauty and precision." –Colm Toibin

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