Married to dangerously charismatic Tyler, despairing of her teenage son's silences and alienated from her zoologist father, Rosamund feels cut off from the world of her Indian childhood. What of she goes back into it? This is a mesmerising tale of love, terror, renewal, and the place of wild nature in all our lives.

"Life began with migration." In a magnificent tapestry of life on the move, Ruth Padel weaves poems and prose, science and religion, wild nature and human history, to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.

"We're all from somewhere else," she begins. "Migration builds civilization but also causes displacement." From the Holy Family's Flight into Egypt, the Lost Colony on Roanoke, and the famous photograph 'Migrant Mother', Padel turns to John James Audubon's journey from Haiti and France, heirlooms carried through Ellis Island, Kennedy's "society of immigrants" and Casa del...

`Here in deep earth, the blackblossom of mourning still sifting within meI remembered that emerald was my birthstone ...'Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel's heartfelt new collection is a grief observed: an elegy for her mother on her death at the age of ninety-seven.