The Raven's Nest

A beautifully vivid memoir about resilience and learning to belong, set in the elemental landscape of Iceland's Westfjords.

Visiting Iceland as an anthropologist and filmmaker in 2008, Sarah Thomas is spellbound by its otherworldly landscape. An immediate love for this country and for Bjarni, a man she meets there, turns a week-long stay into a transformative half-decade, one which radically alters Sarah’s understanding of herself and of the living world.

She embarks on a relationship not only with Bjarni, but with the light, the language and the old wooden house they make their home. She finds a place where the light of the midwinter full moon reflected by snow can be brighter than daylight, where the earth can tremor at any time, and where the word for echo – bergmál – translates as ‘the language of the mountain’.

In the midst of crisis both personal and planetary, as her marriage falls apart, Sarah finds inspiration in the artistry of a raven’s nest: a home which persists through breaking and reweaving – over and over.

Written in beautifully vivid prose The Raven’s Nest is a profoundly moving meditation on place, identity and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption.

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A deeply thoughtful, vivid, enquiring, genre-traversing book, closely attentive to the people and the landscapes with which it dwells. It asks hard questions – and offers no easy answers – about what it means to belong to a place, and to live well upon a part of the earth. Sarah's writing draws readers northwards and inwards upon a fascinating journey.

Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
This book maps the self, the world, and the spaces in between with such tender care. Truly a thing of wonder.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places
Sarah Thomas’ lyrical, thoughtful prose takes us on a journey, both physical and emotional, to the far north.

Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
A metamorphic book bursting with ideas and insights about belonging, acceptance, and supernatural joy. A chronicle of Iceland’s ever-strange, prismic beauty and the myriad ways it works on the heart.

Dan Richards, author of Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth
A story of many stories, nested together. Sarah Thomas evokes characters and culture, a sense of time and the landscape in beautiful prose which makes my brain do cartwheels.

Nancy Campbell, author of The Library of Ice
Both anthropological and tender in detail, Sarah Thomas recalls an immersion that sometimes feels like drowning, at others a rush on swell to the shore. She is a participant in this story, present and implicated in what it means to dwell between tongues, cultures, landscapes and geological timescales.

Abi Andrews, author of The Word for Woman is Wilderness
'The Raven's Nest' is about a meeting of worlds. Sarah arrives in Iceland with a "guest's clear eyes", as Icelanders say. A sincere and perceptive book that explores love, adventure and the search for connections in a big world.

Andri Snær Magnason, author of On Time and Water
Reading it feels like spreading wings.

Stephen Rutt, author of The Eternal Season
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