Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an epoch of heat, as well as posing urgent questions informed by years of writing about climate change and the natural world.

An account of thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada. It combines place-based writing, memoir and travelogue to offer a witness account of the living in and writing about nature, the wilderness and the environment in the Anthropocene.

Latitudes also explores questions central to creative writing and artistic practice. Through her long experience of reading and teaching fiction and non-fiction, in particular nature writing, McNeil examines the question of the role of writers in an age of dramatic ecological loss. Only by mustering a radical attentiveness to the non-human, the book argues, will we rediscover our balance, individually and as a civilization, and gain perspective on the uncanniness of our present era.

"Captivating stuff." — Publishers Weekly

"Meditative and sumptious." — Foreword Reviews

Jean McNeil, a native of Nova Scotia, has lived in London since 1991. She spent the austral summer of 2005-2006 in Antarctica as the British Antarctic Survey/Arts Council of England International Fellow to Antarctica, and has since been writer-in-residence in the Falkland Islands, Svalbard and on a scientific expedition to Greenland.

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"McNeil's lifetime of exploratory journeys have taken her into landscapes that vanishingly few of us will ever see. In shimmering prose, and with her fiercely ethical and sharp eye, McNeil conjures maps of lands known and unknown. Latitudes is a book of great beauty." — Margie Orford, author of The Eye of the Beholder

"Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect." — Julia Bell, author of Massive and Hymnal

"In this meditative essay collection, McNeil (Fire on the Mountain) draws from decades of travel to the world's most remote places to reflect on the beauty and terror of wild landscapes that are under ecological threat. Whether she's recounting her time as a writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research station, an observer aboard a research vessel off the coast of Greenland, or a trainee in an African safari guide program, McNeil captures nature in evocative and dexterous prose... McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." — Publishers Weekly

"Meditative and sumptuous, Latitudes is Jean McNeil's brooding memoir covering travels to remote landscapes; it ruminates on the unsettling impacts of climate change. McNeil is an inquisitive, restless traveler who crafts beautiful and profound passages about her journeys to unusual places. Depicting the splendor of diverse landscapes around the globe, Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." — Foreword Starred Review