The Wild Places
By Robert Macfarlane
Granta £18.99, 352 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.19

Suddenly everyone is wild about the wild. Books such as Jay Griffiths’ Wild and Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees explore natural and cultural phenomena uncontaminated by consumer society. The popular TV series Coast and Mountain focus on the fringes, margins and rocky peaks of an overpopulated island. Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places starts as an essay in this genre: an attempt to find the remaining pockets of wilderness in the British Isles, beginning in the far north and west.