New Releases by Tim Robinson

These poems came to the author after he experienced severe mental illness, and yet lived to regain a normal life.

In the second volume of his beloved Connemara trilogy, cartographer Tim Robinson continues to unearth the stories of this rich landscape in Ireland—weaving placelore, etymology, geology, and the meeting of sea and shore into the region''s mythologies. From the northern fiord waters of Killary Harbour to the southern sea-washed islands of Slyne Head, western Connemara awes with a rugged landscape: sloping cliffs, towering mountains, and the ever-present thudding of the Atlantic. And here, within the earth, resides the record of the past; stones with ash-grey centers reveal volcanic episodes, a series of mysteriously arranged quartz boulders reminds us of the ancient secrets held in the soil, and a long-disappeared lake filled in by sand lies beneath a golf course, waiting to be rediscovered. Mapping more than geography, Tim Robinson charts Connemara''s deep relationship to those who have inhabited its surface. The Last Pool of Darkness brims with tales of ghosts, centuries-old land disputes, periods of religious and political upheavals, philosophers entranced by the isolating landscape, poets, mathematicians, artists, fantastical smugglers, the discovery of botanical rarities, trickster fairies, and the delicate balance between humans and nature. Not merely a "certain tract of the Earth''s surface" but "an accumulation of connotations," Robinson''s Connemara offers readers an opportunity to travel across space and time. A work of great precision and tenderness, The Last Pool of Darkness is an enchanting addition to the Seedbank series and next chapter in "one of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English" (Robert Macfarlane).

Hatham Hall: A Neo-Victorian Gothic Tale of Intrigue and Redemption Step into the world of 1886 and join the enigmatic Eleanor Hatham, a cross-dressing New Woman, as she embarks on a daring endeavour to revive her family's corner of Cornwall devastated by the aftermath of the Repeal of the Corn Laws. In "Hatham Hall," author Tim Robinson weaves a captivating tapestry of love, conflict, and the fight for acceptance. When Eleanor proposes the construction of a new ferry to Ireland, her uncle Petroc Trewin vehemently opposes the influx of immigrants it will bring. Thus, Hatham Hall transforms into a battleground, with tensions running high. As chaos ensues, two outsiders, Hortense and Digby, enter the fray, further complicating matters. Hortense, the daughter of a Caribbean slave, finds solace within the walls of Hatham Hall. However, she struggles against the subservience that is expected of her, yearning for freedom and equality. Meanwhile, Digby, posing as an English gentleman, seeks to exploit the situation, both manipulating the anti-Spanish-and-Irish sentiments of Petroc Trewin and hoping to seize the remaining wealth of the family. As the ghosts of Hatham Hall's dark past resurface and the locals succumb to xenophobia, the very foundation of the house threatens to crumble. Against this backdrop, the characters of the novel become embroiled in a battle for Britain's soul, even as they grapple with their own personal demons. Eleanor, Petroc, Digby, and Hortense must confront their inner ghosts and conquer Hatham Hall to find redemption and peace. Blending elements of satire, romance, intrigue, horror, and humour, "Hatham Hall" takes the reader on a heady romp through a neo-Victorian Gothic landscape, challenging and subverting traditional period myths. Why Choose "Hatham Hall"? Neo-Victorian Gothic Delight: Immerse yourself in a meticulously crafted world of the past, filled with intricate details and vivid descriptions that transport you to the Victorian era. Compelling Characters: Follow the journeys of Eleanor, Petroc, Digby, and Hortense as they navigate their personal struggles, challenging societal norms and battling their own ghosts. Themes of Social Commentary: Witness the timeless battles for acceptance, equality, and the fight against xenophobia, as these themes resonate with the challenges faced by society today. A Unique Blend of Genres: Experience the seamless fusion of romance, satire, intrigue, and horror, creating a narrative that keeps you captivated and engaged until the final page. Unravel the Mysteries of Hatham Hall! Embark on an unforgettable journey through love, mystery, and redemption in "Hatham Hall." This neo-Victorian Gothic novel will subvert your expectations, leaving you enthralled and questioning the myths of the period. To join Eleanor, Petroc, Digby, and Hortense within the walls of Hatham Hall, click the "Buy Now" button and let the spellbinding tale unfold before your eyes.

A mapmaker''s vivid journey through the geography, ecology, and history of Ireland''s Connemara region. Here is Connemara, experienced at a walker''s pace. From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place''s geography, ecology, and history. We begin with the earth right in front of his boots, as Robinson unveils swaths of fiontarnach—fall leaf decay. We peer from the edge of the cliff where Robinson''s house stands on rickety stilts. We closely examine an overgrown patch of heather, a flush of sphagnum moss. And so, footstep by footstep, moment by moment, Robinson takes readers deep into this storied Irish landscape, from the "quibbling, contentious terrain" of Bogland to the shorelines of Inis Ní to the towering peaks of Twelve Pins. Just as wild and essential as the countryside itself are its colorful characters, friends and legends and neighbors alike: a skeletal, story-filled sheep farmer; an engineer who builds bridges, both physical and metaphorical; a playboy prince and cricket champion; and an enterprising botanist who meets an unexpected demise. Within a landscape lie all other things, and Robinson rejoices in the universal magic of becoming one with such a place, joining with "the sound of the past, the language we breathe, and our frontage onto the natural world." Situated at the intersection of mapmaking and mythmaking, Listening to the Wind is at once learned and intimate, elegiac and magnificent—an exceptionally rich "book about one place which is also about the whole world" (Robert Macfarlane). "Visitors to Connemara, that expanse of stony beauty in the west of Ireland, are often struck by its stillness. [This] collection of essays succeeds in the difficult task of staying true to the verities of a place on to which so many fantasies have been projected." — The Guardian

Long recognized as perhaps the greatest non-fiction writer at work in Ireland, for his vast, polymathic accounts of nature and culture in the Aran Islands and Connemara, Tim Robinson is also an essayist of genius whose fascinations range across the globe. In Experiments on Reality, he shines the light of his intelligence on his own life, and on some of the most fascinating questions in science and culture. Robinson brings us to his boyhood in Yorkshire, National Service in Malaya in the 1950s, and his years as a visual artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London. He revisits some of the scenes of his researches for the maps he made of Aran and Connemara, places that continue to throw up remarkable stories and puzzles. And he performs astonishing literary thought-experiments, playing with the boundaries of the essay form, scientific inquiry, and storytelling. Experiments on Reality is a masterpiece from one of the great minds of our time. ''One of the greatest of all landscape writers ... When the material world is brought forth for us so beautifully, with such rapt attention and illuminating insight, we are reminded of how lucky we are to be part of it'' Fintan O''Toole, Irish Times PRAISE FOR THE CONNEMARA TRILOGY: ''One of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English'' Robert MacFarlane, Spectator ''Robinson is a marvel ... the supreme practitioner of geo-graphy, the writing of places'' Fintan O''Toole, Observer Books of the Year ''One of contemporary Ireland''s finest literary stylists ... This is a book that does justice, in every sense of that phrase, to the frequently betrayed people whose stories it incarnates, and to their strange and beautiful corner of the world'' Joseph O''Connor, Guardian ''A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing and a miraculous, vivid and engrossing meditation on landscape and history and the sacred mood of places'' Colm Tóibín, Irish Times Books of the Year ''One of the finest of contemporary prose stylists'' John Burnside, Irish Times ''He is that rarest of phenomena, a scientist and an artist, and his method is to combine scientific rigour with artistic reverie in a seamless blend that both informs and delights.'' John Banville, Guardian ''Breathtaking ... the West of Ireland has found its ultimate laureate'' Patricia Craig, TLS ''Dazzling ... an indubitable classic'' Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller

It is a thousand, thousand years into the future and our world has changed. This is a world of super science, high technology, and a world of magical wonders. It is a world made of many genetically-altered human beings and a few creatures rumored to be not of this world. A small fraction of the population has an ability to use their minds with telekinetic abilities; some far beyond the ability of the average human. Many men use their super mind-powered abilities to help others and for bettering of mankind; however, others may use their abilities for selfish gains and to gain power hoping for world conquest. Anyone that uses his/her superhuman abilities for evil gain are called Inmortal humans, and anyone that uses his/her abilities for good are Immortal (or Emmortal) humans. Both sides continually clash with each other. While one side strives to control mankind and wants man under their control, the good immortals want man to live in peace, love, and harmony. This is the world of the muffins. Muffins are little blue-headed humans whom many evil inmortals hate. Now, read on and let your imagination flow to New America, once in a coming time.

The Eleventh book in the "Tropical Frontier" series, A Salty Tale was written for kids of all ages.Charlie MacLeod and his little feathered pal, Salty the parrot, were living the good life, just the two of them, in their own tropical paradise - until that fateful day, when a little fellow by the name of Bamboo sailed into their lives.

A photographic essay by the French photographer Nicolas Fève, 'Browsing Connemara', with texts drawn from the Connemara trilogy by Tim Robinson, cartographer.

Stone of Aran: Pilgrimmage is, as Robert Macfarlane says in his introduction, ''one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a place that has ever been carried out.'' That place is one of the most mysterious and oldest inhabited landscapes in the world, the islands of Aran off the west coast of Ireland. Desolate, storm-lashed limestone rocks, the islands have been meticulously cultivated for four thousand years, divided up into tiny plots of land that were worked with hard, unremitting labour. Fishing in the open Atlantic seas provided another, lethally dangerous, living. The people who lived there endured and left records in stone, story and oral tradition. Tim Robinson''s epic exploration of the islands, which have already haunted generations of Irish writers, takes the form of a clockwise journey around the coast of Aran. Every cliff, inlet and headland reveals layers of myth and historical memory, and Robinson makes beautifully crafted observations about the habits of birds, plants and humans. There are walls, cairns and ancient forts whose meaning and function is still not clear. And there is the relentless weather, and the strange properties of limestone, slowly dissolving in the rain. This is an unforgettable, uncategorisable book.

Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran is one of the most striking and original literary undertakings of our time. Robinson’s ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape, know it as extensively and intimately as possible, and what it takes to make that knowledge, the sense of the landscape itself, come alive in writing. It is a project that draws on the legacies of Thoreau and Joyce, to which Robinson brings his own polymathic gifts as cartographer, mathematician, historian, and, above all, shaper of words. In Pilgrimage Robinson walked the entire coast of Airann, largest of the Aran islands. In Labyrinth he turns in to the island’s interior. These two books—parts of an inseparable whole that can, for all that, be read quite separately from each other—constitute a vast polyphonic composition, at once encyclopedic and lyrical, scientific and surprisingly personal. Exploring the illimitable complexity and bounty contained in the seemingly limited confines of a single island, Robinson invites us to look without and within and to see the wonder of the world.

The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants’ traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants’ traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. After a visit with his wife in 1972, Tim Robinson moved to the islands, where he started making maps and gathering stories, eventually developing the idea for a cosmic history of Árainn, the largest of the three islands. Pilgrimage is the first of two volumes that make up Stones of Aran, in which Robinson maps the length and breadth of Árainn. Here he circles the entire island, following a clockwise, sunwise path in quest of the “good step,” in which walking itself becomes a form of attention and contemplation. Like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, Stones of Aran is not only a meticulous and mesmerizing study of place but an entrancing and altogether unclassifiable work of literature. Robinson explores Aran in both its elemental and mythical dimensions, taking us deep into the island’s folklore, wildlife, names, habitations, and natural and human histories. Bringing to life the ongoing, forever unpredictable encounter between one man and a given landscape, Stones of Aran discovers worlds. Robinson’s voyage continues in Stones of Aran: Labyrinth

From the two volumes of Stones of Aran to the essays collected in Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and My Time in Space, Tim Robinson has established himself as one of the great non-fiction writers at work in the English language. In light of this, Tales and Imaginings, a collection of imaginative writings from five decades, might seem a profound departure, but to read it is to encounter anew the integrity and connectedness of Robinson''s body of work. In the earliest stories gathered here, we recognize their author as the young Robinson, doing National Service in Malaya, whom we encountered in two searching autobiographical essays from My Time in Space; reading the most recent piece, ''Three Notes on the Elgin Marbles'', we are reminded of Robinson''s essay on his work as a visual artist and its examination of the role of the museum. In between are stories and imaginative essays that engage in unexpected ways with the West of Ireland landscapes Robinson has described so memorably in his previous books. Most of these pieces straddle recognizable genres; for example ''Orion the Hunter'', which can easily be read as fiction, was selected for The Best American Essays 1998. Tim Robinson''s non-fiction writings brilliantly transcend established disciplines and styles, and he has always shown himself to be an imaginative writer of the calibre of Borges and of Sebald. Tales and Imaginings confirms that achievement.

In an essay from 1996 collecton Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and Other Essays, Tim Robinson noted that ''we are spatial entities, which is even more basic than being physical entities, subject to the law of gravity''. In this dazzling new series of essays Robinson examines aspects of his own ''time in space'', moving from his childhood in Yorkshire, to a deadly moment on a Malayan airstrip, a pilgrimage to the midnight sun, adventures in the art-worlds of Istanbul, Vienna and London, and finally to the spaces of the West of Ireland which he has interpreted with incomparable attention and fidelity over the past three decades. The essays explore problems in mathematics and mapping, the human implications of the arc of a missile the feelings of a sceptic upon approaching divine ground in the company of a mystic, and other encounters of the empirical with the numinous: Robinson has an uncanny capacity to write convincingly about both. The sequence ends with an angry outburst against the continuing destruction of the Irish countryside and a moving hymn to the delights of his own house and garden at the edge of the sea in Connemara. My Time in Space is the latest instalment in a literary corpus of singular integrity and endless fascination.

The View from the Horizon is the first attempt to link the work of the artist Timothy Drever with the writings of his alter ego Tim Robinson. Drever's abstract paintings and environmental installations were seen in several exhibitions in London before he moved to the west of Ireland in 1972. Since then, Robinson's maps of the Aran islands, the Burren and Connemara, and his books on the experience of those landscapes, have acquired a devoted readership. Recently, Robinson had occasion to reconsider some Drever constructions dating from just before his disappearance from the London art scene, and recognised in them an abstract foretelling of a suite of images implicit in the later maps and writings. Hence this anxious exploration of the necessity and apparent impossibility of stepping free of one's personal network of metaphors.

In these fourteen related works we witness a great writer, artist and cartographer united with his subject, conveying the vivid experiences of a quarter-century of exploring and mapping the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara. ''Islands and Images'' describes the Aran Islands themselves; ''Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara'', the title-essay, elevates the map-maker''s craft into art; ''The View from Errisbeg'' integrates the landscapes of Galway Bay, the Burren and Connemara by way of topography, botany and geology; ''Space, Time and Connemara'', centrepiece to the collection, surveys the archaeology and human geography of the West, its settlement patterns, families, dispersals and privations, its missioners and the modern tide of tourism and mariculture; ''A Connemara Fractal'' is a fascinating autobiographical digression through Cambridge and the convergences of mathematics, geometry and geology, towards landscape-theory and the Book of Connemara as yet unwritten; ''Place/Person/Book'' introduces Synge''s masterwork, The Aran Islands; ''Listening to the Landscape'' takes for its theme the Irish language and placenames as an emanation of the land; ''Four Threads'' connects four archetypal figures – smuggler, rebel priest, land-agent and wandering rhymer – to their histories in nineteenth century Connemara. Other texts rehearse the potencies of discovery, botanical (Erica mackaiana in Roundstone), archaeological (a Bronze Age quartz alignment in Gleninagh) and personal. Some are anecdotal, some meditative; each is individually conceived as a work of literature. Tim Robinson has been stepping into spacetime since 1972, mapping the unknown by way of the known. With Setting Foot on the Shore of Connemara he captures the numinous in a net of words and images, and creates his own illuminated manual of memory.

In the aftermath of the Great Famine of 1845-52, the Martin Estate in the West of Ireland, 200,000-acres of bog and mountain, was put up for sale. Its mortgagees, the London Law Life Insurance Society, evicted many of the tenants, and in February 1853 sent Thomas Colville Scott to conduct a survey of their property. This is his journal, recently discovered at an auction-house in England. Colville Scott records many an extraordinary encounter with individual survivors of the famine, some traumatized into idiocy, others mysteriously bettering themselves on well-nigh invisible means. The descriptions of squalid hostelries, rent-evading tenants, thieving beggars and the works of ''Papistry'' are those of a cocksure Scots metropolitan – and his account of a meeting of the Clifden Workhouse Guardians is as brutally comic as Thackeray – but his dealings with human flotsam such as the tiny chimneysweep running naked through the snow shows a warm-heartedness that makes this journal as moving as it is richly informative. Drawings by the author and sketches from contemporary guidebooks illustrate the text. Tim Robinson''s introductory essay locates Colville Scott''s responses within the frame of Connemara history and the nineteenth century. His annotations and map detailing the Martin Estate enable the reader to follow, day by day, the young surveyor on his exploration of ''this inhabited desolation, Connemara after the Famine''.

This is a collection of writings by Tim Robinson. As well as Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara, the work includes Place/Person/Book, Robinson''s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Synge''s The Aran Islands. These pieces are written from the perspective of cartography, landscape interpretation, mathematics, art and writing. With the author, the reader explores Connemara, the Burren and Aran Islands, experiencing his initial impression of these islands and his rationale for mapping them in the early 1970s.