Dispersals

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worlds

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?

Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion.

In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them.

Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being "out of place"- whether weeds, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by our hand.

Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in precise and poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they border cross, and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

© Jessica J. Lee 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Critics Review

A stunning record of inheritance, memory and belonging . . . In Lee’s writing, you feel the radical potential of the essay form; at once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life

Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water

Profound, poetic, illuminating and moving, Dispersals’ deep knowledge, sensitivity and research (worn so lightly) addresses just how entwined our fortunes, migration and language are with plants; how much we are part of nature. Important and vivid

Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down

The author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection. An insightful meditation on nature and identity within ‘a world in motion

Kirkus Review

Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline . . . This deserves a wide audience

Publishers Weekly

A beautiful book about belonging—plant and human. A work that will make you look at the orange in your hand, the moss underfoot, the tea that you sip a little more closely. Lee turns her careful gaze to the easy stories we tell ourselves about foreign and native, and leaves us with a vision of the world simultaneously more nuanced and more precious

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of 'Starling Days'

Dispersals is a beautifully written and complex book . . . [Lee] shows us with stunning prose, tenderness and precision the unexpected ways that we all connect and are connected by the plants around us

Amanda Thomson, author of ''Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home'

Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings — by people and by plants — to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration

Literary Hub

Richly textured . . . These essays critically probe the native/nonnative paradigm of invasive-species ecology. Lee’s voice will stay with readers long after they finish this book

Library Journal (starred review)

A brilliant, thoughtful, and thought-provoking collection of essays, which expertly blend personal reflection and natural history . . . you will not look at the plants around you in the same way again

Polly Atkin, author of 'Some of Us Just Fall'

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