FICTION · BIOGRAPHY
Jay W. Griffiths
Also known as: Jay Griffiths
Jay Griffiths was born in Manchester and studied English Literature at Oxford University. She spent a couple of years living in a shed on the outskirts of Epping Forest but for many years she has been based in Wales. The first book she wrote was Anarchipelago, a story about the British anti-roads protests. The second book she wrote was Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, a manifesto for time and against clocks. It explores the political nature of time, and illustrates some of the diverse ways in which indigenous cultures perceive time. It is a polemic against the play-less, life-denying ways in which modernity sees time.
Legends were born here.
— from Wild
Most acclaimed
Tristimania
The author of describes her extreme, year-long bout of manic-depression that lead to psychotic hallucinations, left her vulnerable to a sexual assault, and set her adrift in a fog of medications and doctors visits.
Wild
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mother's death, with nothing more to lose, Strayed made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker--indeed, she'd never gone backpacking before her first night on the trail. Her trek was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone. Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and intense loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her. [www.cherylstrayed.com]
Kith
1977
While sixteen-year-old Rue Silver travels into the faerie realm to find her mother, faerie creatures are entering the human world and wreaking havoc, forcing Rue to ponder where her loyalty should lie.