Publishers Weekly
05/16/2022
In this intriguing travelogue, historian Green (London: A Travel Guide Through Time) explores eight British settlements that “exist only as a shadow of their former selves.” The lives of some villagers, such as the inhabitants of Skara Brae, an archaeological site dating to the third century BCE on the Orkney Islands, remain mysterious despite the discovery of beads, paint pots, bed frames, and other artifacts. Other ruins figure in modern rivalries, such as the dispute between amateur archaeologist Stuart Wilson and professionals over whether he discovered the lost medieval city of Trellech in a Welsh field in the early 2000s. In some cases, the reasons for a site’s abandonment remain murky; in others, however, they’re crystal clear. In 1942, 750 villagers in Breckland, East Anglia, were relocated in order to establish a military training area, and in the 1960s, the Welsh town of Capel Celyn (the “Village of the Dammed”) was flooded to create a reservoir for Liverpool. The last ruins of the medieval city of Dunwich collapsed into the North Sea in 1922—a fate that will be increasingly common, Green warns, as climate change worsens. Full of evocative imagery and fascinating lore, this vibrant account eulogizes the past and issues a stark warning for the future. Illus. (July)
New York Review of Books - Colin Thubron
"In Matthew Green's Shadowlands, ruins offer a bittersweet therapy. They confer perspective on Green’s distress…and he becomes obsessed, even comforted, by absence itself, by failure…[An] arresting book."
New Yorker
"[Green] visits eight ruined British settlements…[S]uch lost places are not mere historical curios…they provide cautionary tales about sustainability."
Iain Sinclair
"A haunting work of resurrection, stinging in a perpetual present. Shamanic consciousness for the borderlands of memory."
William Atkins
"Superb. A beautifully written atlas of Ghost Britain, a summoning of places lost to memory, and a deft excavation of the void underlying myths of national identity."
Literary Hub - Jonny Diamond
"If you told me that British historian Matthew Green was some kind of delightful English Calvino who’d conjured up an odd fictional encyclopedia of disappeared cities, lost towns, and ghostly villages, I’d still want to read this book…[I]t is worth spending a little time with history’s stark examples of time’s dominion over us all."
Suzannah Lipscomb
"An exquisitely written, moving, and elegiac exploration of the dead ends and lost causes of history—a book to savor and cherish."
Claire Tomalin
"Shadowlands is so well researched, beautifully written, and packed with interesting detail. Matthew Green is both historian and prophet, offering a warning we need to pay attention to.… Alarming and valuable."
Charlotte Higgins
"A haunting, lyrical tour around the lost places of Britain."
The New Yorker
"[Green] visits eight ruined British settlements…[S]uch lost places are not mere historical curios…they provide cautionary tales about sustainability."
Wall Street Journal - Elizabeth Lowry
"Beguiling…Shadowlands is not just a travelogue of scenic obsolescence. En route, the book offers us a gripping overview of humankind’s seemingly unstoppable evolution from primitive but harmless nomad to the rapacious bureaucrat in charge of civic planning in your neighborhood today."
Ian Mortimer
"A beautiful book, truly original. Shadowlands is poetic history written with great literary flair, inqusitiveness, soul-searching and humanity…It is a marvelous achievement."
Library Journal
★ 06/01/2022
First-time author Green's haunting travelogue through Britain's disappeared places is both an examination of the historical forces that led to their abandonment and a meditation on the presence of absence in physical and emotional landscapes. From the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae in Scotland's Orkney Isles, nearly perfectly preserved beneath the coastal sands, to the Welsh village of Capel Celyn, drowned beneath the waters of a reservoir, Green skillfully imagines what life was like in each location before its demise. He contrasts visions of vitality with the melancholy stillness of each site's present state. In the 13th century destruction of Winchelsea, a once-prosperous port swallowed up by encroaching tides, Green sees a timely warning of environmental disaster, while the poignant story of Wharram Percy—a village that faded away in the years after the plague--serves as a reminder of how world events can upend local economies. In each case, Green evokes the deep loss felt by the displaced as livelihoods, traditions, and cultures disappeared along with the communities that supported them. VERDICT Through these slices of British history, Green has woven a moving exploration of impermanence, memory, and the hypnotic allure of the past.—Sara Shreve
