Land Beneath the Waves by Nic Wilson

When I first received The Land Beneath the Waves, I was expecting a nature memoir—but what I got was something far more entangled: a personal reckoning with chronic illness, family history and memory, wrapped up alongside a devotional offering to the natural world.

Expertly avoiding any sense of self-pity, Wilson uses nature not as a cliché-cure, but as a witness: moths, nightingales, chalk-streams, snickets of suburban wildness.

The prose had a poetic, observational quality, capturing the flicker of a red kite outside the window, and the hush of a woodland edge, and how it can stir memories and soothe inner turmoil, all the while nudging her toward self-acceptance.

In my opinion, The Land Beneath the Waves is quietly powerful. It doesn’t pretend nature will “fix” you—but shows that paying attention to wildness around us can help ground us, even when the ground underfoot feels vulnerable. So, for anyone who’s been challenged by issues around health, loss or identity (surely, that's all of us), and anyone who has ever found solace in a hedgerow alive with birdsong (like me), this is worth reading.

I am certainly adding it to my bibliography for my MA final project.