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Sixty Degrees North

Published by Pegasus Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

About The Book

The sixtieth parallel marks a borderland between the northern and southern worlds. Wrapping itself around the lower reaches of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, it crosses the tip of Greenland and the southern coast of Alaska, and slices the great expanses of Russia and Canada in half. The parallel also passes through Shetland, where Malachy Tallack has spent most of his life.In Sixty Degrees North, Tallack travels westward, exploring the landscapes of the parallel and the ways that people have interacted with those landscapes, highlighting themes of wildness and community, isolation and engagement, exile and memory.An intimate journey of the heart and mind, Sixty Degrees North begins with the author's loss of his father and his own troubled relationship with Shetland, and concludes with an embrace of the place he calls home.

About The Author

Malachy Tallack is the award-winning author of three previous books: Sixty Degrees North, The Un-Discovered Islands, and, most recently, a novel, The Valley at the Centre of the World. He has received both a New Writers Award and the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from the Scottish Book Trust, and as a singer-songwriter has released four albums and an EP. Malachy grew up in the Shetland Islands and currently lives in central Scotland.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Pegasus Books (July 12, 2016)
  • Length: 240 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781681771885

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Raves and Reviews

"The book's real power comes from Tallack's poet’s eye."

– New York Times Book Review

"A graceful account of northern peoples’ relationship to their environment, and a thoughtful consideration on the meaning of home."

– Winnipeg Free Press

"Delves into the local culture, dispelling myths and seeking common bonds. The history is captivating and adds context to each place visited. This book balances history, travel, and culture on an interesting path around the world."

– Library Journal

"A promising debut from the new school of travel writing examines the significance of place and what it means to belong. This is a book about belonging. Tallack is one of a burgeoning group of young travel writers who have reinvigorated the genre with elements of psychogeography: the study of how places make us feel."

– The Guardian

"A memoir remarkable for its intimacy, wisdom, and radiant prose. Tallack renders descriptions of his emotional landscape as delicately as his painterly descriptions of the physical world. An enthralling meditation on place."

– Kirkus Reviews

"A new kind of travel writing that emphasizes and explores the relationship between people and place."

– Providence Journal

"A remarkable survey of cultures, climates and histories. [Tallack’s] writing is thoughtfully composed, beautiful and often surprising. An extended meditation on longing and belonging, on personal ties to place and on the particular nature of a certain band of earth and sea."

– Shelf Awareness

"Malachy Tallack is the real deal, a writer given over to pure curiosity, honest witness and that most precious of gifts, an unselfconscious sense of wonder. Not just a vibrant new voice, but a wise, questioning and highly sophisticated talent."

– John Burnside, author of 'Waking Up in Toytown: A Memoir'

"It is a brave book...and a beautiful book."

– Robert Macfarlane, author of 'The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot'

"It is a brave book...and a beautiful book."

– Robert Macfarlane, author of 'The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot'

"Throughout his travels, Tallack beautifully sketches a sort of emotional geography of place, a yearning to connect with communities and landscapes."

– Dallas Morning News

"Elegant, meditative, and wry. Tallack takes the reader on some fascinating excursions."

– Gavin Francis, author of 'True North: Travels in Arctic Europe'

"A subtle, thoughtful study of life on the sixtieth parallel. Highly enjoyable."

– The Financial Times

"Although Sixty Degrees North is a book about a journey, and a very personal journey at that, it is one which provokes in the reader their own internal discussion about place, attachment, and what it means to be home."

– Elsewhere Journal

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