This is a remarkable book. It is about wild places, but not 'mountains and moorlands', but places destroyed by pollution, disaster and war. Cal Flyn not only gives us a feel of what grows and lives in those places, but also how they came about and what it feels like to visit them.

The book brought to mind a couple of memories of places I've visited myself. One was the same as she briefly describes in chapter two. A few years ago on our family holiday, we visited the old border between East and West German, on the edge of Thuringen. It had an astonishing array of flora, I remember seeing wild Daphne shrubs in flower, all sorts of orchids and other interesting things and lots and lots of birds. All due to being left alone for decades during the Cold War.

I also remember when I was a botany student going on a field trip to an old lead mine in the Peak District. One of our lecturers was one of the world's leading experts in the sort of metallophytes that are described in the book. Rumour had it that he earned a high consultancy fee (for the department) prospecting for mining companies with that knowledge. He showed us the rare plants growing there, and later we analysed samples for the metals they contained.

The best chapter was about the wild cattle herd on Swona. That was absolutely fascinating.

I read this book in an excellent translation by Wybrand Scheffer. Most of the time it didn't even feel like a translation, and that doesn't happen very often for me with books written in English.

The book has two sections of photographs, which were all of excellent quality. However, the areas she visited were all so well described that I already had a clear image in my mind before seeing the photos, and mostly it looked the same. That says a lot about the quality of the writing.