Land Beneath the Waves
How the Natural World Helped One Woman Navigate Chronic Illness, Self-Acceptance and Belonging – One of BBC Wildlife’s best nature books of 2025
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Land Beneath the Waves
Narrated by:
Nic Wilson
Buy Now for £17.94
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Narrated by:
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Nic Wilson
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By:
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Nic Wilson
About this listen
When Nic Wilson begins researching the history of her local landscape and its wildlife, the last thing she wants to do is consider her own past. But as she unearths tales of giant sequoias, puss moths, nightingales and chalk streams, Nic realizes her affinity with the nearby wild began as a way to handle growing up with a mother who lived with a debilitating chronic illness.
Now in her forties, and struggling with mental and physical health herself, Nic revisits her childhood to trace the influence of the natural world on her life. As she grapples with revelations from the past, the boundaries between self and land become increasingly porous, and the lure of the wetlands around her home threatens to engulf her. Can she find the strength to face the waves of chronic illness - past and present - and learn to reach for steady ground?
With the natural world facing more threats than ever before, Land Beneath the Waves inspires us to develop a meaningful bond with our local natural spaces and landscapes, illuminating a hopeful path towards a better future for human and non-human life.©2025 Nic Wilson
Critic reviews
What happens when a nature writer turns their attention to the most unnerving of all landscapes - those that exist in our bodies and minds? Nic Wilson has done just that, exploring internal thickets of tangled nature and nurture, wild gardens where the composted past feeds the present, marshes of intermingled memory and meaning. The result is a book of great courage, curiosity, discovery and connection.
Both ordinary and profound, Land Beneath the Waves charts a process most of us never manage: to give a true account of ourselves. It's also an illuminating testimony of chronic illness, one that fellow sufferers will recognise and the rest of us can only be enlarged by.
A beautiful, moving memoir highlighting the amazing relationships humans have with the natural world, and what they mean for us.
A deeply honest, forensically detailed account of a life blighted by ill-health, yet redeemed by a profound connection with nature - a delight to read.
Land Beneath the Waves is a tender portrait of how a family grows in tandem with the natural world. The body, here, is re-storied: it becomes both an object of contemplation in the Wilson's quest to make sense of chronic illness across generations, and the stage for vital, lively connection with plants, water, land, and place. It is hopeful, vibrant, and alive.
A moving, honest and compassionate story of illness, and the beauty and succour to be found in the natural world. Nic reveals the complexity of our relationships with wildlife and landscapes, which does not simply offer a cure but can help us meet the challenges of chronic ill health.
When our health fails, nature seems harsh, yet in Land Beneath the Waves Nic Wilson offers a tender love song to both the body and the wild world, even when - especially when - both are under threat. Exploring the complex territories of debilitating illness, motherhood and finding healing in nature, her writing reclaims the great outdoors for those who so often are shut in. Hopeful and brave.
This one's different. It's not another book about the soothing power of the wild (view them with suspicion) but a taut, unself-pitying inquiry into the nature of nature, the nature of suffering, the caprice of memory and the slipperiness of identity: a sort of theodicy that mentions nightingales but not God. Nothing in the real, living world is incidental, and because the book is a real, living thing, nothing here is incidental either. It's a tightly woven ecosystem of woods, anxiety, hedges and hope. It will endure long after more emollient books have been pulped.
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