A passionate defence of the rights of children, and of the universal values of freedom, nature and the imagination: it is a book written by a Huckleberry Finn with an accidental anthropology degree.

 

While travelling the world in order to write her award-winning book "Wild", Jay Griffiths became increasingly aware of the differences in how childhood is experienced in indigenous cultures. From communities in West Papua and the Arctic to the ostracised young people of contemporary Britain, she asks why we have enclosed our children and denied them the freedoms of space, time and deep play.

 

She uses anthropology, history, philosophy, language and literature to illustrate children’s affinity for the natural world, for animals and woodlands, and examines the quest element of childhood. Arguing that the risk-averse society enfeebles children, robbing them of the physical freedom they both want and need, Griffiths illustrates how the stress of overscheduled lives denies children their hours of unclocked reverie.

 

This is not a parenting book. It is a book for people interested in the human spirit at all ages.

​

​​​​

Reviews and Endorsements:​

​

"Scintillating, passionate, supremely honest. Adults and children need more books like this"

- Literary Review

 

"I didn't just read this book; I revelled in it. There's a rare vitality and robust energy ... reading this book feels like playing in the woods. An unabashedly Romantic rallying cry for childhood. Playful and polemical, emotional and imaginative. As vital as play itself"

- Independent

 

“Kith could have been written by no-one but Jay Griffiths. It is ablaze with her love of the physical world and her passionate moral sense that goodness and a true relation with nature are intimately connected. She has the same visionary understanding of childhood that we find in Blake and Wordsworth, and John Clare would have read her with delight. Her work isn't just good -

it's necessary.”

– Philip Pullman

​

 

“A subterranean book.  We excavate it to refind the  secrets of childhood, our own, and many other childhoods in times and places far from ours.  We join an underground resistance to the capital of grown-up greed, accountancy and profit.  We rejoin the Bears.”

– John Berger  

 

"Jay Griffiths is one of our most poetic and passionate critics of the ways of civilisation, provocative, illuminating and shamelessly romantic."

- Theodore Zeldin

​

​

“An impassioned, visionary plea to restore to our children the spirit of adventure, freedom and closeness to nature that is their birthright.  We must hear it and act on it before it is too late.”

– Iain McGilchrist

​

​

“Jay Griffiths writes with such richness and mischief about the one thing that could truly save the world: its children.”

– KT Tunstall

​

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​