The Book of Mysteries

'Insightful and bracing: a personal and political journey through the seasons' Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley'A wonderfully unmooring passage through a year that connects to life that is deeper, looser, and more true than the tightly wound, unnatural calendars so many of us keep' Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy'This book is a precious and life-affirming gift to our hearts and intellects' Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small FiresAt festive gatherings celebrating summer's peak, in reflective moments as winter gave way, Rebecca Tamás began to hear another rhythm. A faint hint that, underneath the rush of clocks and calendars, another, richer kind of time might exist. As she suffered from grief and burnout, Tamás sought a deeper connection to the movement of the seasons through an immersion in old folkways. She set out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions. From a confrontation with the sharp pains of winter at Samhain in Edinburgh to a giddy experience of collective joy at Padstow's May Day, she found in these traditional practices electric potential for transforming our relationship to the natural world. Intellectually penetrating and richly lyrical, The Book of Mysteries follows the drumbeat of seasonal ritual towards an immersion in the wild time of the earth. Ecstatic, radical and irreverent, this book is a rallying cry to wrest time away from the structures of work and capital, so as to encounter the life-giving mystery of the natural world.