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Shop nowNess
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBrought to you by Penguin.
Eerie, unsettling and hauntingly beautiful - a new collaboration from the bestselling creators of Holloway, Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood.
A unique audiobook experience, narrated by Stephen Dillane, set to a bespoke score by composer, Hugh Brunt. Recorded and produced at Abbey Road Studios, London.
Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a ritual with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him.
Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving to the point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness has lichen skin and willow-bones. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time. Ness has hagstones for eyes and speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back.
What happens when land comes to life? What would it take for land to need to come to life?
Using words, the pair have together made a minor modern myth. Part-novella, part-prose-poem, part-mystery play, in Ness their skills combine to dazzling, troubling effect.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of The Lost Words with Jackie Morris, The Old Ways and Underland. Stanley Donwood is an artist and the author of Slowly Downward, Household Worms and Bad Island.
'...it's a listening experience marked by its oddity, its vocabulary...it's a compelling and unsettling experience' - Financial Times Weekend
'With its mythical atmosphere and rhythmic pleas...this is a work that is best heard out loud' - The Guardian
'Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb -- it is an aftertime song' Max Porter, Booker-longlisted author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Score by Hugh Brunt
Co-produced by Hugh Brunt and Jake Miller
Engineered and mixed by Jake Miller
Field recordist: Peter Eason
Recorded at Abbey Road Studios
Soprano: Josephine Stephenson
Assistant engineer: George Oulton
Mastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road Studios
© Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood 2019 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Robert Macfarlane is the bestselling author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland, and co-creator of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. The Lost Words won the Books Are My Bag Beautiful Book Award and the Hay Festival Book of the Year. Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times. He is now working on his third book with long-time collaborator, Jackie Morris: The Book of Birds.
Stanley Donwood is a graphic designer, artist and writer. He has worked with the British band Radiohead since 1994, producing the artwork for all their albums and promotional materials. He is also the author of numerous books including Catacombs of Terror!, Slowly Downward and Small Thoughts. His collaboration with Robert Macfarlane, Ness, will be published in November 2019.