Rag and Bone

A Family History of What We've Thrown Away

By: Lisa Woollett

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Paperback | 13 May 2021 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
1.9 x 12.9 x 19.6

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Lifelong mudlarker, Lisa Woollett, takes the reader on a lyrical, urgent journey from the Thames out to Cornwall, writing beautifully about nature, consumer culture and the history that can be found on our shores.

Lisa Woollett has spent her life combing beaches and mudlarking, collecting curious fragments of the past: from Roman tiles and Tudor thimbles, to Victorian buttons and plastic soldiers.

In a series of walks from the Thames, out to the Kentish estuary and eventually to Cornwall, she traces the history of our rubbish and, through it, reveals the surprising story of our changing consumer culture.

Timely and beautifully written, Rag and Bone shows what we can learn from what we've thrown away and urges us to think more about what we leave behind.

About the Author

Lisa Woollett's family have found value in what is thrown away for generations - her great-grandfather was a scavenger and her grandfather was a dustman, while she herself has been a beachcomber all her life, and in recent years has taken photographs of her beach and river finds. She is the author of two award-winning photography books about the sea, and Rag and Bone won a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction. She has lived in Cornwall with her family since 2004, in a house shared with buckets and boxes of shore finds.

Industry Reviews

Rag and Bone digs deep into the mud of the Thames estuary, and comes up with something compelling and urgent - history told through rubbish. Lisa Woollett is a genuine mudlark, alert and closely attuned to the ways of the intertidal zone. A fascinating book

Mudlark and beachcomber Lisa Woollett journeys into her family's past, our collective history and our possible futures. Subtle, dark and funny, with flashes of beauty and wonder, Rag and Bone is a compelling meditation on the consumer culture and its consequences

Tracing the remote and recent past - her own, and ours - through watery debris, Lisa Woollett conjures up, in poetic prose and brilliant stories, the spin cycle of history. In Rag and Bone, she elegantly picks her way through the trash, to reveal something gloriously and richly strange: a portrait of what we were and what we might become

Absorbing . . . Woollett has a gift for bringing to life the strange borderlands of the foreshore - Observer

A delicious confection of a book, blending history and memoir with thoughts and close observation. I so enjoyed watching shadows of the past flit across Lisa Woollett's watery pages. It is a timely book, too, when, as Woollett writes, "our waste threatens to overwhelm us"

Lisa Woollett's beautifully descriptive language intertwines the stories of the river's history with that of her family, like a muddy journey through time. But it's so much more than that - in recording the waste and the lives we've left behind she's given us a chance to change our ways and possibly head towards a cleaner future

If you loved The Salt Path, you'll love this book. A glorious celebration of where the natural world meets the human (and the messes we make)

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