An Alaskan River Journey

Kings of the Yukon

**Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018 and the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year 2019** 
 
'Weymouth combines acute political, personal and ecological understanding, with the most beautiful writing reminiscent of a young Robert Macfarlane. He is, I have no doubt, a significant voice for the future' Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times literary editor 
 
'Adam Weymouth takes his place beside the great travel writers' Susan Hill 
 
A captivating, lyrical account of an epic voyage by canoe down the Yukon River. 
 
The Yukon River is almost 2,000 miles long, flowing through Canada and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Setting out to explore one of the most ruggedly beautiful and remote regions of North America, Adam Weymouth journeyed by canoe on a four-month odyssey through this untrammelled wilderness, encountering the people who have lived there for generations. The Yukon's inhabitants have long depended on the king salmon who each year migrate the entire river to reach their spawning grounds. Now the salmon numbers have dwindled, and the encroachment of the modern world has changed the way of life on the Yukon, perhaps for ever. 
 
Weymouth's searing portraits of these people and landscapes offer an elegiac glimpse of a disappearing world. Kings of the Yukon is an extraordinary adventure, told by a powerful new voice.

Weymouth combines acute political, personal and ecological understanding, with the most beautiful writing reminiscent of a young Robert Macfarlane . . . He is, I have no doubt, a significant voice for the future . . . a really outstanding new contemporary British voice . . . I've never seen such a strong and excited consensus among the judges for a winner.

Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times literary editor and judge of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018

Lyrical ... The elegiac tone that fills Kings of the Yukon, the sorrow at the loss of culture and nature in the wilderness, is an unavoidable reflection of life in the 21st century

A rich and fascinating book ... So vivid it reads like a thriller ... I was hooked

[Weymouth's] account ... is so assured, so accomplished, that I found it hard to believe it was his first book ... rich in characters, and beautifully written.

Michael Kerr, 'The best Christmas books for travellers'

An epic ... Eloquent and tautly written

I was knocked sideways by this book and quite unexpectedly. Adam Weymouth takes his place beside the great travel writers like Chatwin, Thubron, Leigh Fermor, in one bound. But like their books this is about so much more than just travel.

[A] brilliant account of a summer spent paddling the 2,000-mile length of the Yukon River... Kings of the Yukon succeeds as an adventure tale, a natural history and a work of art. Its various threads of context and back story are woven seamlessly into the daily panorama of the river journey

Dazzling, often in unexpected ways, Adam Weymouth is a wonderful travel writer, nature writer, adventure writer - along the way, he is also a nuanced examiner of some of the world's most fraught and urgent questions about the interconnectedness of people and the natural world.

This is the best kind of travel writing. Weymouth embarks on an ambitious journey - 2,000 miles down the Yukon in a canoe - voyaging, listening and learning. An outstanding book

author of The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees

An enthralling account of a literary and scientific quest. Adam Weymouth vividly conveys the raw grandeur and deep silences of the Yukon landscape, and endows his subject, the river's King Salmon, with a melancholy nobility

Adam Weymouth's account of his canoe trip down the Yukon River is both stirring and heartbreaking. He ably describes a world that seems alternately untouched by human beings and teetering at the brink of ruin

A moving, masterful portrait of a river, the people who live on its banks, and the salmon that connect their lives to the land. It is at once travelogue, natural history, and a meditation on the sort of wildness of which we are intrinsically a part. Adam Weymouth deftly illuminates the symbiosis between humans and the natural world - a relationship so ancient, complex, and mysterious that it just might save us

Shift over Pierre Berton and Farley Mowat. You, too, Robert Service. Set another place at the table for Adam Weymouth, who writes as powerfully and poetically about the Far North as any of the greats who went before him

author of Original Highways: Travelling the Great Rivers of Canada

Adam Weymouth writes of the Yukon River, the salmon and the people, with language that flows and ripples like the water he describes. There may be a smoothness to the words, but pay attention, there are deep undercurrents here. You can hear the water dripping from his paddle between each stroke as he travels that river. It mingles with the voices of the many people he visits along its shores

author of Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (and Yours)

Beautiful, restrained, uncompromising. The narrative pulls you eagerly downstream roaring, chuckling and shimmering just like the mighty Yukon itself

An infatuated love letter to the river

I thoroughly enjoyed traveling the length of the Yukon River with Adam Weymouth, discovering the essential connection between the salmon and the people who rely upon them. What a joy it is to be immersed in such a remote and wondrous landscape, and what a pleasure to be in the hands of such a gifted narrator

author of The Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

This book is an important contribution to our understanding of threatened ecosystems and what it means to be human on the edge of ecological catastrophe. I loved the sensitive but deeply powerful weave of pesca-poetry, knowledge and encounter that immersed me in the midst of the Yukon's forces and left me subtly transformed

Adam Weymouth's work has been published by a wide variety of outlets including the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New Internationalist. His interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them has led him to write on issues of climate change and environmentalism, and most recently, to the Yukon river and the stories of the communities living on its banks. He lives on a 100-year-old Dutch barge on the River Lea in London. This is his first book.

The Yukon River is over 2,000 miles long, flowing northwest from Canada through the Yukon Territory and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Setting out to explore one of the most ruggedly beautiful and remote regions of North America, Adam Weymouth journeyed by canoe on a four-month odyssey through this untrammelled wilderness, encountering the people who have lived there for generations. The Yukon's inhabitants have long depended on the king salmon who each year migrate the entire river to reach their spawning grounds. Now the salmon numbers have dwindled, and the encroachment of the modern world has changed the way of life on the Yukon, perhaps for ever. 
 
Weymouth's searing portraits of these people and landscapes offer an elegiac glimpse of a disappearing world. Kings of the Yukon is an extraordinary adventure, told by a powerful new voice.

Adam Weymouth

Weymouth's prose has a glinting precision of analysis and evocation to it; his intense curiosity and empathy extend across species boundaries as well towards people and landscapes. Weymouth has written a deeply fascinating story, grippingly told.

A majestic and hopeful journey, movingly told by one of our master storytellers

A lovely, untwee piece of nature writing, full of incident, colour and nuggety facts.

Sharing Adam Weymouth’s epic journey across Europe in the footsteps of a pioneering wolf is to walk the knife-edge between the tame and the wild. A bold, beautiful, confronting journey charting a continent buckling under social and environmental pressure. A book about a wolf, about love and hate, and our conflicted relationship with nature and our fellow human beings. A timely and fascinating read

An excellent book. Literary reportage at its best. Weymouth has the flare of Joan Didion and the eye for striking detail of Ryszard Kapuscinski. 
 
In Lone Wolf, Adam Weymouth reaffirms his position as a hugely valuable guide to complicated, contemporary problems – environmental breakdown, human migration, political fragmentation – problems we have no choice but to confront now.

Robert Penn, author of THE MAN WHO MADE THINGS OUT OF TREES

Adam Weymouth has the extraordinary ability to narrate a global story of conflict and climate, migration and intolerance, vulnerability and resilience, through the lens of one species. One instinctively trusts what he writes because his senses are so finely tuned to the natural world - including to us corrosive humans - and his precise prose balances simplicity with depth, erudition and wistfulness.

Tobias Jones, author of THE DARK HEART OF ITALY

An intricate, intimate interweaving of wolf and human worlds, Weymouth's journey acts like a thread that draws the two together. His storytelling is as supple and powerful as the wolf itself, perfectly paced and balanced. A book full of hope for recovery in a fractured continent.

Through the footsteps of the wolf, Weymouth reveals the ‘faultlines’ of Europe, the faultlines in nature, and some of the faultlines of the human condition. He achieves an imperative of our times: he has written a book that weaves natural ecology to human ecology in one scintillating fabric

Professor Alastair McIntosh, author of SOIL AND SOUL and POACHER'S PILGRIMAGE

Adam Weymouth is a fine, fine writer - beautifully balanced, dexterous, sensitive, and gifted with the ability to create the most haunting images. His portrait of the wolf in this immensely thoughtful and inventive book is astounding and at time jaw-dropping, his account of the natural and cultural world through which it travels profound. Like Bruce Chatwin, he’s equally at home with nature, culture and people and approaches them all with the same insight. Wonderful.

Lone Wolf beautifully explores the intertwined histories of wolves and humans in some of the remotest parts of Europe. Adam Weymouth brings nuance and sensitivity to the fraught question of how humans can – or should – co-exist with the wilder species we live among and has an uncanny ability to bring to life these creatures as they move like quicksilver through the landscape. Lone Wolf encourages us to examine our thoughts around the politics of borders, the management of habitats, and asks questions about how we might live with grace on our planet.

Lone Wolf is a major addition to the lupine literary canon — at once a gripping animal adventure story and a thoughtful meditation on history, wanderlust, and belonging in a globalized world. Few writers see this mythologized and misunderstood predator as clearly as Adam Weymouth

Ben Goldfarb, author of CROSSINGS and EAGER

Lone Wolf is a fascinating story that travels deep into both the natural and human world to shine a light on the puzzling contradictions within European farms, farming and the agricultural mind. It is a delight to read, and, in the best ways, deeply troubling. I loved this book

Beautiful and as propulsive as a dispersing wolf, Weymouth uses the path taken by Slavc to travel into Europe's soul. Engaging deeply with locals about wolves, climate change, modernity, and immigration, Weymouth gives the people he meets room to tell their own stories. The reader comes away with deepened understanding and compassion for people on every side of the debate over Europe's ongoing rewilding. Essential reading for armchair adventurers and for those who wish to explore the sometimes uncomfortable complexities of rewilding on a thoroughly humanized continent

A unique and wonderful book. By following the path of a single wolf, Adam Weymouth surveys the state – both social and ecological – of a changing Europe. There is no better observer of the landscape, nor a better guide to the challenges and rewards of returning the wolf to its lost territory across the continent

A wolf's footsteps, followed; a continent's faultlines, traced: Adam Weymouth has made a formidable, thousand-mile foot-journey, both in the tracks of a wolf and into the heart of human-animal relations in contemporary Europe -- and written an exceptional book about it. His prose has a glinting precision of analysis and evocation to it; his intense curiosity and empathy extend across species boundaries as well towards people and landscapes. Weymouth has written a deeply fascinating story, grippingly told -- and produced a second book to stand alongside his outstanding debut, Kings of the Yukon.

An original and thrilling journey that takes the fragility of human and animal co-existence, and with masterful skill, weaves it into a compelling story for our times

Weymouth's polished prose captures both the joy and beauty of his peculiarly inspired trek. He can also be witty, as with his line about rows of snow cannons 'lined up in batteries, taking aim at climate change'. He never sees a wolf in the wild, but, camping out one night in Slovenia, a lynx passes close to his tent. In a flash, all his questions disappear. He merely sits there, acutely aware of his vulnerability, his earthy nature stirred, moved that human and predator should share the same space, 'both parts of a bigger whole'. If for that feeling alone, wolves deserve their place in our crowded modern world.

This is a profound book, and both Weymouth and Slavc are beguiling companions (the former as winningly open as the latter is mysterious) . Together they walk their readers to a more informed and thus more empathetic place . Solvitur ambulando - it is solved by walking - indeed.

Weymouth displays how man-made political mechanisms play out in not just the human world but the natural world. By doing so, he reminds us of the pivotal role we play in the entire ecosystem. Lone Wolf is essential reading not only for keen readers of travel, nature and animal writing but for anyone interested in history and geopolitics.

Adam Weymouth’s Lone Wolf introduces us to not only a story or set of issues, but to another possible way of living, giving us the taste of a life in which we immerse ourselves in the world around us and the people we encounter ... Above all Lone Wolf is a love story, humanizing for us an animal that for centuries people have cruelly persecuted to the point of extermination. Weymouth’s effort to think like a wolf is a powerful example of empathy and interspecies solidarity that we need to take with us as we aspire to build a society, one where the value of living things is at the centre.

Silvia Federici, author of CALIBAN AND THE WITCH

[A] moving, vivid account ... Weymouth’s gift for description, especially of landscapes, is evident on almost every page.

Weymouth is an uncommon brand of travel writer, weaving natural history with culture and politics ... He carefully picks at the Gordian knot linking wolves and rural communities, teases out nuances, and tells a complex story of a world in transition ... To observe and absorb the natural-human interface, as Weymouth does, is an art, one that would benefit those on both sides of the wolf divide.

[Weymouth has] a narrative voice that [is] taut but gentle, peppered with scientific research and a lyrical attentiveness to wilderness ... Beautiful ... Lone Wolf is an astonishing book because the author, a rough-sleeping wolf-tracker, has the humility to listen to all sides of the debate ... The writing is crisp but calm.

Thoughtful, empathetic . . . his pen portraits are vivid and acute . . . If he keeps going like this, the next book will be extraordinary.

Beautifully interwoven and lovingly written.

A compelling insight into the most mysterious and evocative of beasts, it’s relationship with land, history, politics – and ourselves.

In 2011 Slavc, a wolf, set off from Slovenia and travelled 2,000 kilometres in search of a mate. For this original, lyrical travelogue, the author follows in his pawprints and reflects on rural life , migration and folklore. The wolf, it turns out, embodies many of Europe's divides.

This is nature writing at its best: lyrical and evocative, yet honest and brutally unsentimental.

The Times, Science and Environment Books of the Year

For exquisite, absorbing and thought-provoking non-fiction, you’d struggle to find anything published this year to match Adam Weymouth’s Lone Wolf. I adored every page of his account of a 1,000-mile journey retracing, on foot, the wolfsteps of a GPS-tracked animal named Slavc across Slovenia, Austria and northern Italy. The wolf – one of man’s most feared species – is a lens through which he explores a continent grappling with economic, climate, migratory and social upheavals, all while interrogating the fraught co?existence of human and animal. Every page sings.

Beautifully interwoven and lovingly written

Walking the Faultlines of Europe

In 2011, a young wolf named Slavc set out from Slovenia. Tracked by GPS, he travelled a thousand miles through the Alps, arriving four months later on the Lessinian plateau, north of Verona. There had been no wolves in northern Italy for a century, but here he crossed paths with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. A decade later and there are more than a hundred wolves back in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting. 
 
In Lone Wolf, Weymouth walks Slavc's path, examining the changes facing these wild corners of Europe. Here, the call to rewild meets the urge to preserve culture; nationalism and globalisation pull apart; climate change is radically changing lives; and migrants, too, are on the move. 
 
The result is a multifaceted account of a region caught in a moment of kaleidoscopic flux, from an award-winning writer with a uniquely perceptive eye for detail.

Adam Weymouth

Praise for Lone Wolf

Weymouth's prose has a glinting precision of analysis and evocation to it; his intense curiosity and empathy extend across species boundaries as well towards people and landscapes. Weymouth has written a deeply fasc ...

A majestic and hopeful journey, movingly told by one of our master storytellers

A lovely, untwee piece of nature writing, full of incident, colour and nuggety facts.

Weymouth's prose has a glinting precision of analysis and evocation to it; his intense curiosity and empathy extend across species boundaries as well towards people and landscapes. Weymouth has written a deeply fasc ...

A majestic and hopeful journey, movingly told by one of our master storytellers

A lovely, untwee piece of nature writing, full of incident, colour and nuggety facts.

Weymouth's prose has a glinting precision of analysis and evocation to it; his intense curiosity and empathy extend across species boundaries as well towards people and landscapes. Weymouth has written a deeply fasc ...

A majestic and hopeful journey, movingly told by one of our master storytellers

A lovely, untwee piece of nature writing, full of incident, colour and nuggety facts.

Books by Adam Weymouth

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