August 2025 Non-Fiction Book of the Month | Caly recommends... No Straight Road Takes You There - Rebecca Solnit

Caly recommends... No Straight Road Takes You There is a distinctive collection of essays ranging widely from the climate crisis to masculinity. It’s a thoughtful, compassionate and hopeful commentary on the contemporary moment and speaks to a malleable sense of the future, unmarred by the problems of the present.

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This book's title is an evocation and a declaration. Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away - logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through - but to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, and to embrace slowness and imperfection, which, she argues, are key to understanding the possibilities of change.

In her latest essay collection, the award-winning writer explores responses to the climate crisis, as well as reflections on women's rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible, and offering us all a path out of the wilderness.