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  • Published: 14 August 2017
  • ISBN: 9780141980317
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 560
  • RRP: $30.00

The Art of Flight




Two more tales of memory, nature, travel and collecting from the author of the Swedish bestseller The Fly Trap

Stories just begin. We rarely know where and almost never why. It doesn't matter. Nothing is certain any longer. I just want to shut my eyes, point at random and say, as a sort of experiment, that once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree. That's where it may have started.

In this follow-up to The Fly Trap, Sjöberg continues to explore the pleasures and trials of those who spend their time tracing the smallest details of the natural world. In these two tales, he calls on his childhood memories and experience as a hoverfly collector, and follows the trail of long forgotten entomologists before him who left their native Sweden for the United States. From Stockholm to the Grand Canyon, Sjöberg contemplates the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.

  • Published: 14 August 2017
  • ISBN: 9780141980317
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 560
  • RRP: $30.00

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Praise for The Art of Flight

Digressive, discursive and delightful.

Michael Kerr, Telegraph

A joy . . . Fredrik Sjöberg's best-selling memoir The Fly Trap marked him as a maestro of the episodic. Here, he completes a trilogy.

Nature

By his own admission Sjöberg has a "butterfly mind"; the effect of his narrative excursions amounts to a sort of Sebald-lite, albeit without the fictional element. What insures this approach against triviality is the author's patient alertness to pattern, to telling correspondence.

Nat Segnit, Times Literary Supplement

Delightful, at once informative and often humorously digressive . . . a humane man of wide-ranging curiosity, Sjöberg writes with infectious passion.

Independent