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2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist (Environmental Literature)
"McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." Publishers Weekly
"Meditative and sumptuous… Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." Foreword Reviews
"Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect." Julia Bell, author of Massive and Hymnal
"Her shimmering prose brings into sharp focus the beauty of the remote places where we can glimpse – and sometimes hear – what our planet was like before us. And what it might be in the silence that will come after the frenzy of human dominance." Margie Orford
"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year." Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio
"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year." Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio
"Latitudes is a book that will linger with you long after you have turned the last page." – Sarah Birch in The Hackney Citizen
Relating thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of a changing planet. At once memoir, journal and travelogue of Earth's wildernesses, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada.
Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an age of dramatic ecological loss. It shows us the importance of listening to the living world that is speaking to us, if we open ourselves to hear its voice.
"In this meditative essay collection, McNeil (Fire on the Mountain) draws from decades of travel to the world's most remote places to reflect on the beauty and terror of wild landscapes that are under ecological threat. Whether she's recounting her time as a writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research station, an observer aboard a research vessel off the coast of Greenland, or a trainee in an African safari guide program, McNeil captures nature in evocative and dexterous prose... McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." — Publishers Weekly
"Meditative and sumptuous, Latitudes is Jean McNeil's brooding memoir covering travels to remote landscapes; it ruminates on the unsettling impacts of climate change. McNeil is an inquisitive, restless traveler who crafts beautiful and profound passages about her journeys to unusual places. Depicting the splendor of diverse landscapes around the globe, Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." — Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
"McNeil's lifetime of exploratory journeys have taken her into landscapes that vanishingly few of us will ever see. In shimmering prose, and with her fiercely ethical and sharp eye, McNeil conjures maps of lands known and unknown. Latitudes is a book of great beauty." — Margie Orford, author of The Eye of the Beholder
"Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect." — Julia Bell, author of Massive and Hymnal
"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year… It's a really brave examination of self and of humankind, but ultimately it's a beautiful love letter to the Earth." — Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio
"Latitudes is for all its aesthetic intensity a melancholy volume, with an elegiac tone that is at points overwhelming. At the same time, it is a book that will linger with you long after you have turned the last page." — Sarah Birch, The Hackney Citizen
| Prologue | ix |
| Part I: We Walked Out of This Land | 1 |
| Ephemeral | 8 |
| Running | 13 |
| The Edge of Reality | 17 |
| The Quenching | 23 |
| The Trophic Pyramid | 28 |
| Part II: The Bowl of Winter | 35 |
| Uncharted Waters | 42 |
| Albedo | 48 |
| Paleo People | 54 |
| Ilulissat | 59 |
| Hotel Arctic | 63 |
| Part III: The End of Desire | 71 |
| Las Islas | 78 |
| Stone Runs | 83 |
| Storm Petrel | 90 |
| Part IV: Bitter Pastoral | 99 |
| The Land With No Fat | 105 |
| The Skeleton Coast | 110 |
| Part V: The Blue Desert | 121 |
| Departures | 132 |
| The Ninth Wave | 135 |
| Crossing the Line | 141 |
| Dark Ocean | 148 |
| Part VI: Bush of Ghosts | 157 |
| Lion Charge | 163 |
| The Ivory Trail | 169 |
| The Firing Range | 176 |
| Black Mamba | 180 |
| Part VII: The Land of Letting Go | 191 |
| Bluefields | 197 |
| Magic! | 202 |
| The Last Glacial Maximum | 210 |
| The Far Field | 216 |
| Part VIII: The Rainy Season | 221 |
| Cloudforest | 227 |
| All Men Want to Know | 232 |
| Currents | 237 |
| Part IX: Boreal | 243 |
| The Quickening | 251 |
| Latitudes | 257 |
| Epilogue | 261 |
| Acknowledgements | 267 |