Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
Abridged
Poems from The Mara Crossing - Abridged by Ruth Padel
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Poems from The Mara Crossing - Abridged

Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Ruth Padel

This audiobook uses AI narration.

Weโ€™re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 2 hours 25 minutes
Language English
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Summary

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does 'native' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain?

In a selection of richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes from her collection The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.

'We're all from somewhere else,' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa.

Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival.

Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting