The Edges of the World
At the margins of life, lands and history
Published on 22. January 2026
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-85752-939-8 (ISBN)
Description
New York Times bestselling author Charles Foster argues that all the best ideas happen at the edges, from a rocky precipice where the first human set foot in Europe to an ancient Egyptian temple where monotheism was invented.
'Literal "eccentricity" is where the scientific, artistic and spiritual giants have always found their home. Venture with Foster if you dare, and embrace life.' Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary
We tend to think that everything important comes from the centre: from big cities, from established orthodoxies in the sciences and the arts, from the Establishment in all its forms. We think this because the centre tells us it is so, but it's a lie. It is only at the edges that we think, innovate and thrive.
This book travels to the frontiers of human culture and consciousness; to the edges of continents, of evolution, of artistic and political movements, and life itself: from a rocky precipice in the Peloponnese where the first human set foot in Europe to an ancient Egyptian temple where monotheism was invented; from St Francis, kissing lepers to the giant bird-eating mice of St Kilda.
Why do we stare at sunsets? Why do we celebrate birthdays and grieve for those who are gone? Why do all adventures begin when we leave and get lost? Who has the better view of reality - the Government or the dispossessed?
And what happens when we live with the knowledge that we're all teetering on the edge of the dark?
'Literal "eccentricity" is where the scientific, artistic and spiritual giants have always found their home. Venture with Foster if you dare, and embrace life.' Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary
We tend to think that everything important comes from the centre: from big cities, from established orthodoxies in the sciences and the arts, from the Establishment in all its forms. We think this because the centre tells us it is so, but it's a lie. It is only at the edges that we think, innovate and thrive.
This book travels to the frontiers of human culture and consciousness; to the edges of continents, of evolution, of artistic and political movements, and life itself: from a rocky precipice in the Peloponnese where the first human set foot in Europe to an ancient Egyptian temple where monotheism was invented; from St Francis, kissing lepers to the giant bird-eating mice of St Kilda.
Why do we stare at sunsets? Why do we celebrate birthdays and grieve for those who are gone? Why do all adventures begin when we leave and get lost? Who has the better view of reality - the Government or the dispossessed?
And what happens when we live with the knowledge that we're all teetering on the edge of the dark?
Reviews / Votes
In our heavily centralised and conformist world, we sorely need this passionate, imaginative insight into the vital role of life on the borders, the very fringes of the world. Foster makes it clear that the much-vaunted centre is literally a nowhere, a place of soulless self-congratulation and imaginative death. Literal "eccentricity" is where the scientific, artistic and spiritual giants have always found their home. Venture with Foster if you dare, and embrace life. -- Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter With Things The Edges of the World is hard to put down -both a passionate broadside against the boring, the overmighty, the false and the tyrannical, and a genre-hopping defence of the marginal, the eccentric and the truly alive. Art, ideas, inventions, change, life itself - all of these, Charles Foster reminds us, emerge from the margins. -- Paul Kingsnorth, author of Against the Machine This book plays pyrotechnics across the mind's sky: outrageously erudite, mercilessly funny and spectacularly serious. -- Jay Griffiths, author of How Animals Heal Us and Wild Brilliant -- Mark Cocker * Guardian * One of the most interactive books I've ever read - in the sense that I've filled every page with underlinings, exclamation marks, asterisks, scribbled assents and dissents. Charles Foster is wise, puckish, learned company but the performance, brilliant as it is, is never about its brilliance: he is asking us to consider what it is that makes us human and how might we go about doing a better job of it. -- Gregory Norminton, author of The Devil's Highway Electrifying, wayward and compulsively brilliant, The Edges of The World lifts back the crackling wires of modernity and beckons to an earth still riven with the strange and the good. The writing is pungent with ideas and bursts of wit and grief in equal measure. Foster understands the holy clarity that edge-things provoke, & the uncanny power of the new encounter. Edges leaps in our hand like a gleeful salmon and we have little choice but to dive into the river after it. -- Martin Shaw, author of Liturgies of the Wild Charles Foster's magpie mind gathers shining new treasures in this book, and once again he shows us a different way of understanding what it is to be human. As ever, his scholarship is worn lightly and his storytelling is superb. An ambitious, outrageous quest and a joyful rallying call. -- Nick Hunt, author of Outlandish and Red Smoking Mirror One of the most amazing, and uncategorizable, books I've read in ages... so weird and wonderful and thought-provoking that I hardly know where to start. -- Rod DreherMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Transworld Publishers Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 163 mm
Width: 242 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
500 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-85752-939-8 (9780857529398)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
01/2026
Transworld Digital
€14.99
Available for download
Person
Charles Foster is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, and won the Ig Nobel Prize for Biology and the 30 Millions d'Amis Prize. He is a fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford, and has particular passions for Greece, waves, the Upper Palaeolithic, mountains and swifts.