Kirjahaku

“I look up into the falling rain, letting it splash in my face, and hope against hope that the inspiriting green can yet disturb the civilised order before it consumes everything. This is, I suppose, an activist’s prayer. May the green spill into our lives and burst out again in a hundred thousand practices of vitality, attention, and care.” What happens when we embrace wildness, as individuals and as a society? Wildest Dream poses this question, tracing the figure of the Green Man as he has passed through the ages, amongst our May festivals, church walls and peasant protest, and into emerging movements of resistance and change. Along the way we meet characters old and new, and find communities striving for a better world. While the Green Man’s story asks that we confront the violence faced by people and planet, David Gee’s enduring message is above all one of hope – a beautiful challenge to live in deeper communion with each other and the earth.

Looking for her wayward son in 1960s Italy, an English widow encounters revelations and begins a dangerous romance. In Venice Lillian Rutherford meets the ex-gigolo who has shared the last four years of Andrew's life; his disclosures force her to confront a side of her son that she never suspected. Going on to Amalfi, she meets the charismatic Prince Massimo Monfalcone, whose playboy son is being held to ransom in Corsica with Andrew. Massimo distracts Lillian with his life story: his first wife was murdered in a Sicilian blood-feud; his second wife killed herself because of his infidelity. As they wait for news of their sons, a bond grows between Lillian and the Prince...

Hope is a determination to live for what is worth living for today, whatever tomorrow may bring. In the bleakest of times hope may seem beyond our grasp, but David Gee’s stirring book helps us to see where we might find it, step-by-step, moment-by-moment, in ourselves, in those alongside us, and in the world around us. Hope’s Work is written to re-fresh and re-engage people who struggle to keep faith with hope in an age of violence and crisis, and is essential reading for our times. Drawing on stories of hope and resistance from past and present, this short, beautifully-designed book goes in search of what is worth living and working for, even as the future becomes harder to face.