The Word for Woman Is Wilderness - Softcover

"This deeply feminist adventure tale is a splendid, innovative response to the genre of masculine travelogue."
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"A philosophy book at heart... charming, and funny, and smart... I absolutely loved this book."
--Liberty Hardy, All the Books! Podcast (Ep 200), BookRiot

"A great read: through the adventures of her protagonist Erin, Andrews challenges the traditional patriarchal narratives of adventure, exploration, and constructs of 'wilderness' in a story that is equal parts witty, charming, and deeply compelling."
--Yvonne C. Garrett, The Brooklyn Rail

"Abi Andrews gives us a resilient, vulnerable, and sharp-thinking character for her debut novel, yet it's her strong feminist voice that makes The Word for Woman Is Wilderness an absolute must read... It's quick and smart and really just in a league of its own."
--Jaylynn Korrell, Independent Book Review

"Just thirty pages into The Word for Woman Is Wilderness, I couldn't make heads or tails of it, which, in my mind, is the best thing a novel can accomplish. But maybe 'novel' isn't the best word--perhaps a globetrotting, Thoreauvian whodunnit? A bricolage of literary, feminist, and anthropological thought, gazing out the throat of the anthropocene? I've roamed this earth for a few decades and never found anyone who writes or thinks like Abi Andrews. Don't anticipate this book. Fear it. Love it."
--Spencer Ruchti, Harvard Book Store

"Erin is a captivating heroine--funny, feminist and intensely curious, she riffs on Bear Grylls, the beauty of the natural world and the contraceptive pill as she makes her way to a tiny cabin in desolate Denali. Brilliantly odd, and oddly brilliant."
--Eithne Farry, Daily Mail

"Andrews' debut, dotted with true stories of trailblazing women (such as those enrolled on Nasa's first female astronaut fitness programme), contains razor-sharp insights and poetic passages, and will hook those interested in the whole idea of wilderness and self-discovery."
--Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, The Guardian

"Refreshingly outward-looking in a literary culture that turns ever inward to the self, although it still has profound moments of introspection. Uplifting, with a thirsty curiosity, the writing is playful and exuberant. Riffing on feminist ideas but unlimited in scope, Andrews focuses our attention on our beautiful, doomed planet, and the astonishing things we have yet to discover."
--Ruth McKee, The Irish Times

"The Word for Woman Is Wilderness is unlike any published work I have read, in ways that are beguiling, audacious... rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue."
--Sarah Moss, The Guardian

"Abi Andrews' writing is sprawling and peripatetic, drawing many links between a variety of topics; a deliberate foil to the white Western male scientific method of separating and isolating things. It is a youthful and exuberant novel, funny and cool. But the subject matter is deadly serious. This is a philosophical rumination on what nature is in the Anthropocene, if indeed it ever existed at all. Moreover, it asks what women are in relation to not only a chauvinist globalised culture, but also a masculine interpretation of wilderness. Read this book. It is amazing."
--Michael McLoughlin, Readings

"It will make you feel as small as an ant and colossal as an ocean, will take you to the depths and heights of earth and beyond into the vastness of space. With humour, irony, wit, intellectual musing and the essential power of womanhood, it is impossible to see the world the same again after the final leaf is turned."
--Lauren Brown, Go With Me

"More of a philosophical musing than a novel, The Word for Woman Is Wilderness narrates the struggle of a young woman to find a place for herself in a world that idealizes masculinity and wilderness and that puts nature and humanity in direct opposition, necessitating the destruction of one or the other."
--Emma Schneider, Full Stop

"This gorgeously written debut will have you longing for adventure; it's full of wonder at the natural world, as well as musings on everything from the moon landings, loneliness, nuclear war and the pill."
--Dusty Baxter-Wright, Cosmopolitan Middle East

"This is not reconciliatory prose. It doesn't seek to please. It's not asking for your acceptance or the benediction of this review. It is far stronger than that. It is a quiet, sardonic, funny, fluid text, a visionary book, that shows us the future is in fact already here."
--Caught by the River

"A gripping feminist reimagining of Into the Wild."
--Elle

"A thinking woman's adventure story... [Andrews' prose has] grace and reflection... beautiful, thoughtful, and often humorous."
--Lucy Scholes, The National

"The many-colored themes and ideas in the book are themselves painted on complex and overlapping canvases--of feminism, in an age of wilderness, but a wilderness that has been warped as it becomes embedded in the Anthropocene."
--The Ecologist

"A good book is one that makes you think about your own life. A great book is one that challenges your thinking. But it is a truly remarkable book that changes how you think, and The Word for Woman Is Wilderness had that effect on me. I can't give it higher praise than that."
--Bookmunch

"[The Word for Woman Is Wilderness] provides a fresh take on the adventure novel genre as a whole."
--Amber Williams, Her Campus

"Make room, Jack London! Andrews's debut novel... balances a feminist corrective to the wilderness mythology."
--Addie Hopes, Edge Effects (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

"[The Word for Woman Is Wilderness] is immersive, thought-provoking, and a unique reading experience."
--Jenny Colvin, Reading Envy

"[Delivers] a fierce love for the wilderness and a call to subvert systematic gender marginalization."
--Elisabeth Woronzoff, PopMatters

"Refreshing and funny and unlike anything else. I feel as if I've been waiting for this book for a long time."
--Daisy Johnson, author of Fen

"A thought-provoking read... A book that made me daydream and will stay with me for a long time."
--Lipsy Lost & Found blog

"Erin's voice not only conveys her intelligence, but also the immense talent of the writer herself. Abi Andrews writes from her mid-twenties with the voice of someone far beyond of her years."
--Hannah M Smith, Department of Information Studies blog, University College London

"Clever, funny and thoughtful."
--Will Ashon, author of Strange Labyrinth

THE OFFICIAL NORTH AMERICAN EDITION
"Beguiling, audacious... rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue." —The Guardian

This is a new kind of nature writing — one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape.

Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is travelling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She is making a documentary about how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society: the “Mountain Man.” She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, a la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective.

The book is a fictional time capsule curated by Erin, comprising of personal narrative, fact, anecdote, images and maps, on subjects as diverse as The Golden Records, Voyager 1, the moon landings, the appropriation of Native land and culture, Rachel Carson, The Order of The Dolphin, The Doomsday Clock, Ted Kaczynski, Valentina Tereshkova, Jack London, Thoreau, Darwin, Nuclear war, The Letters of Last Resort and the pill, amongst many other topics.

"Refreshingly outward-looking in a literary culture that turns ever inward to the self, although it still has profound moments of introspection. Uplifting, with a thirsty curiosity, the writing is playful and exuberant. Riffing on feminist ideas but unlimited in scope, Andrews focuses our attention on our beautiful, doomed planet, and the astonishing things we have yet to discover." —Ruth McKee, The Irish Times