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The Book of Mysteries
- Author
- Rebecca Tamás
- Narrator
- Lianne Walker
- Publisher
- Pushkin Press
- Publish Date
- 4 June 2026
- Run Time
- 6 hours 46 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
At festive gatherings celebrating summer's peak, in reflective moments as winter gave way, Rebecca Tamás began to hear another rhythm. A faint hint that, underneath the rush of clocks and calendars, another, richer kind of time might exist.
As she suffered from grief and burnout, Tamás sought a deeper connection to the movement of the seasons through an immersion in old folkways. She set out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions. From a confrontation with the sharp pains of winter at Samhain in Edinburgh to a giddy experience of collective joy at Padstow's May Day, she found in these traditional practices electric potential for transforming our relationship to the natural world.
Intellectually penetrating and richly lyrical,
The Book of Mysteries follows the drumbeat of seasonal ritual towards an immersion in the wild time of the earth. Ecstatic, radical and irreverent, this book is a rallying cry to wrest time away from the structures of work and capital, so as to encounter the life-giving mystery of the natural world.
Critics Review
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Whenever I read Rebecca Tamás, I find myself enormously grateful for the suppleness of her mind, and for her prose writing that is as lucid as it is lush, and as useful as it is beautiful. The Book of Mysteries left me facing down the year feeling newly attuned to wild time, and perhaps apter to the sometimes-impossible seeming task of wriggling out from beneath the dragnet that capital casts over the world. I will be recommending this book to everyone
A. K. Blakemore, author of 'The Manningtree Witches'
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A delicious exploration of the ritual year, ripe with the uncanny
Katherine May, author of 'Wintering'
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Insightful and bracing: a personal and political journey through the seasons
Melissa Harrison, author of 'All Among the Barley'
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A searing exploration of the ways in which capitalist time restricts and defines our lives. In reaching towards wild time and capturing the embodied, living experience of ritual and community, this book offers a sense of possibility. It gives us different ways to inhabit our world, minds and bodies, so that we might live more freely
Jessica Andrews, author of 'Milk Teeth'
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A wonderfully unmooring passage through a year that connects to life that is deeper, looser, and more true than the tightly wound, unnatural calendars so many of us keep. The Book of Mysteries reminded me of the current that runs beneath everything, and that, if we are open to it, can transform us
Amina Cain, author of 'Indelicacy'
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Details
- Author
- Rebecca Tamás
- Narrator
- Lianne Walker
- Duration
- 6 hours 46 minutes
- Release Date
- 4 June 2026
- ISBN
- 9781805338406
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Pushkin Press
- Genre
- Memoirs, Green politics / ecopolitics / environmentalism
Synopsis
At festive gatherings celebrating summer's peak, in reflective moments as winter gave way, Rebecca Tamás began to hear another rhythm. A faint hint that, underneath the rush of clocks and calendars, another, richer kind of time might exist. As she suffered from grief and burnout, Tamás sought a deeper connection to the movement of the seasons through an immersion in old folkways. She set out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions. From a confrontation with the sharp pains of winter at Samhain in Edinburgh to a giddy experience of collective joy at Padstow's May Day, she found in these traditional practices electric potential for transforming our relationship to the natural world. Intellectually penetrating and richly lyrical, The Book of Mysteries follows the drumbeat of seasonal ritual towards an immersion in the wild time of the earth. Ecstatic, radical and irreverent, this book is a rallying cry to wrest time away from the structures of work and capital, so as to encounter the life-giving mystery of the natural world.
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