FOUR Forthcoming Books
Bonnett, A. (forthcoming, early 2026) Nature’s Return: How Environmental Nostalgia is Shaping the World and Can Help Us Survive the Future, (Polity, Cambridge).
Nostalgia for nature is everywhere. A yearning for a greener, less polluted, more beautiful past shapes what we buy, where we go, and what we hope for. This book explores and explains the roots and routes of environmental nostalgia and shows how it is unfolding in different ways across the planet but also why it contains the seeds of change. Today the past is a refuge and a comfort but also a source of inspiration. Can nostalgia save the world? Of course not but it can offer signposts to a better future.
Press
‘Anti-environmentalism is on the rise but it’s full of contradictions’, The Conversation, May 22, 2025, https://theconversation.com/anti-environmentalism-is-on-the-rise-but-its-full-of-contradictions-256911
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Geography’s Futures: New Horizons for the World Discipline
Palgrave, London, 2026/7
This major new statement sets out the challenges and opportunities for the ‘world discipline’. It charts five main forces that will shape geography’s future. It also offers an argument for the importance of geographical knowledge in a world that is increasingly interconnected and yet faces environmental and geopolitical changes that are pulling people apart.
Questions around the future of geography have become pressing and they are now an integral part of introductory courses for geography students. Where once such courses looked back, to the imperial and western roots of geography, they now increasingly also look forward. In part this is because of worries over the future of the discipline in schools and universities. However, it is also a reflection of the fact that the field is expanding and facing new challenges: the rise of post-Western perspectives, crises of survival and sustainability, an ‘AI revolution’ and the dawning of off-Earth geography, all offer trajectories that are radically reshaping ‘the world discipline’. Moreover, geography has a new popular audience, geography teachers and a geographical public, who are fascinated by the future of geography. In recent years the author has been writing about the future of geography and this book will provide the first book length treatment of the subject.
Bonnett, A. (forthcoming, October 2025) Extraordinary Islands: An Atlas of Unlikely Places (Ivy Press/Quarto, London)
Explore the World’s Most Extraordinary Islands: A Journey Through the Strange, Scary, Remote, and Naturally Odd
Dive into a captivating exploration of 30 of the world’s most unique and enigmatic islands, each with its own compelling story. This visually stunning book is divided into four sections, each revealing a different facet of these extraordinary locales:
Strange Uncover islands that defy the ordinary.
Scary Venture into the eerie and unsettling. .
Remote Journey to the furthest corners of the earth.
Naturally Odd Marvel at nature’s peculiar creations.
Each chapter is a voyage into islands of wonder and mystery, offering a unique perspective on our planet’s most intriguing and lesser-known corners. Whether it’s an exploration of ambitious human endeavors or natural marvels, this book is a visual and narrative feast for the curious traveller.
Strange
Tana Qirqos: Sacred Island of the Ark
Tanna: ‘Cargo Cult’ Island
Santa Cruz del Islote: The Big Horizons of a Crowded Island
Chars of Assam: Unsettled Islands
Kihnu: Island of Women
Samson: An Island Back in Time
Ocean Flower: A Modern Fairy Tale
Maldives Floating City: Islands of the Future?
Scary
Runit: Monster Island
Poveglia: The Horror and the Lies
Anak Krakatau: Child of Krakatau
Fire Island: Russia’s Prison Island
BRP Sierra Madre: A Frontline Island
Barque Canada Reef: Vietnam’s New Military Islands
Remote
Fort Jefferson: America’s Distant Fortress
Inaccessible Island: The Furthest Shore
North Sentinel Island: Modern Survivalists?
Yesterday and Tomorrow Islands: A Cold War Across Time
Aasta-Hansteen: Mega Rigs at the Edge of the High Seas
San Nicolas Island: A Story of Survival and Loss
Socotra: Dragon Blood Trees and Fighter Jets
Naturally Odd
Mayda Insula and the Magic Islands of Titan
A23a: A Travelling Island
Kipuka: Islands Surrounded by Lava
Ferdinandea: A Fleeting Island
Tuppiap Qeqertaa: Discovering a New Island
Floating Island, Northumberland
Pumice Raft: The Ocean’s Transport Islands
Île René Levasseur: The Eye of Quebec
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New Ruins
(Ivy Press/Quarto, London) forthcoming 2026
This is the age of ruins. The wrecks of our speeding, super-sizing, impatient era can be found on the Moon and at the bottom of the sea, in the internet’s haunted attics, in desecrated jungles and in abandoned shopping malls inhabited by dust and spiders. We live amid the accumulating debris of an economy that can’t stop producing, building and digging, creating mountains of stuff, little of which lasts very long.
taster:
Ruins of a Library
The ruined library is an indelible symbol of decay. Every town in the USA and UK seems to have an ex-library; sometimes more than one. Occasionally they are shuttered up, with unloved books sunk in dust on toppled shelves; more usually they have been converted into apartments or demolished. With each passing year fewer remember what a public library was even for.
The smart redevelopments and the empty wrecks look very different but they both speak of the decay of civic life; for each registers the loss not just of books but of a public institution. Libraries were open access communities of learning and they demanded something not insignificant from their users. I’m not talking about library fines but the ability to participate in a communal learning space, and sit still and read. Lonely hours spent scrolling for fresh media fragments have replaced this civic culture but, of course, they are no replacement at all.
There are far more ruined libraries today than functioning ones. The last century and a half saw a huge expansion of libraries. Our twenty-first century has witnessed an even more extraordinary erasure of them. They are a favourite destination of American urban explorers; who have gathered startling images of discarded books in once grand surroundings; for example, in the Detroit Public Library Mark Twain Branch and the Detroit School Book Repository. The former has been demolished; the latter converted. Usually libraries don’t last long as ruins. Their wrecked husks have the power to embarrass governments in a way unsurpassed by other ruins. No city wants such a dramatic display of the triumph of ignorance.
I suspect that there is no country in the world whose cities and towns have more former libraries then Britain. Between 1880 and 1970 thousands were founded; not just imposing ones but smaller neighbourhood ones; all proud repositories and a link in a complex network of inter-library loans, curatorship and a shared respect for education. Few of the smaller ones have survived. Run by local government, they were subject to mass closures in the 2000s and 2010s; a process that was often followed by the opening of a centralised replacement service, typically with a strong steer to books in large print and a lot of computer terminals.
It’s hard to blame local government: they had little choice. Their funding was being throttled and their primary duty was social care; looking after the needs of vulnerable adults and children. Libraries were low hanging fruit: they were cut first and cut hard.
And reading habits were shifting: going to a library felt inconvenient and old-fashioned.
This is all true … but the fascination and melancholia of ruined libraries goes beyond hard funding choices and shifts in behaviour. It goes beyond snippy remarks about the attention span of the modern reader, which – after all – is you and me. Its touches on something much bigger: how a public culture, built up steadily and carefully, was abolished hastily; with little or no thought as to its real value.
Hyde Library was once the main library for the town of Hyde, a suburb of Manchester, and it spans three large floors of an ornate, red brick, purpose-built Victorian palace of learning. At the time of writing, it’s a dangerous ruin but it’s ripe for the kind of development that will probably see the facade retained and apartments slotted inside the demolished interior. A stone plaque outside announces its opening on the 3rd July, 1897. With oddly backhanded modesty a contemporary newspaper reported that ‘to Hyde at any rate, the edifice will be a thing of beauty’. It has stood empty since 2015 when the town’s library service, and a selection of its books, were transferred to small facility inside Hyde Town Hall.
With the help of images taken by some intrepid local photographers (‘Absolutely mad place! Very soggy and definitely unstable in places,’) we can take a wander through the ruins of Hyde Library. Our footsteps crunch over broken plaster and glass but it’s the bright colours that first strike you: layers of paint and wallpaper are peeling in multicoloured ribbons and patches. This is a building that has seen generations of repainting. A magazine carousel awaits a spin; it’s hanging open at Railway Illustrated. On the floor lies the buffoonish cover, now mouldering with black spots, of Families and How to Survive Them by Robin Skyner and John Cleese.
One room is piled with of dozens of bright red fire extinguishers.
Further on a delicate Victorian spiral staircase emerges from the gloom and draws the hand, taking us up to caved in corridors and a laboratory with grimy glass vials and racks of horribly discoloured hair. Apparently this was a ‘hair dye training room’. Occasionally you hear the rush and flutter of the pigeons that now occupy the hollows of this labyrinth.
Hyde Library was renovated in the 2000s, with a new gallery dedicated to local artist Harry Rutherford. The Rutherford Gallery’s glass doors remain unbroken and much of the renovated areas, with their glass sided stairwell, are in good condition though plaster fragments covered the PCs and the modern square ceiling and carpet tiles are a geometric patchwork of black holes.
Libraries often accommodated other services and Hyde Library was home to the Tameside Fostering Service. On one wall there’s a white board, filled in with marker pen: a grid has been drawn arranged by month, with numbers for ‘Initial Enquries’, ‘Application Packs sent’ and ‘Carers Recruited’. The fostering service has a suite of offices. On the front panel of one door we read ‘Please be aware all report bundles are confidential’. But glimpsing into the room reveals wallpaper so damp and distended that it is puffing extravagantly out from the walls, billowing in shreds across a table where children’s lives were once argued over.
Hyde Library was supposed to be a survivor. In 2013, a phase of cuts at the local council shut all the town’s smaller libraries with the promise that there would be improved facilities at Hyde Library. The closure of Hyde Library a couple of years later reduced the service to a residual outpost accommodated in Hyde Town Hall. One local councillor pointed out that the ‘council has tried to get a quart into a pint pot, there’s a total lack of space’.
The British public library service is a fading from memory. In many cities nothing remains to remind us of this loss but in a few there is a jarring, radical, challenge to forgetting. The ruin. In a culture of mute compliance to the private redevelopment of public assets, only the ruined public building speaks of civitas and service. If we take the bus a dozen miles from Hyde we’ll find another loud ruin. It is an ex-library that reminds us that no amount of modernisation and renovation was ever enough to save them. The Lancastrian Hall and Central Library was built in 1969 in then fashionable brutalist style of interconnecting concrete masses. This concrete goliath has been called ‘the last gasp of Municipal Modernism’ and dominates the town of Swinton.
As well as a library this complex offered a theatre and lots of space for civic and community meetings, wedding receptions and election counts. The whole maze was shut in the same year as Hyde Library, in 2015.
Again, urban explorers have prised open the wrappers and allow us to delve into the library’s now unvisited and forbidden spaces. Their photographs show that an incredible amount has been left untouched, including piles of 2000s furniture. There are yards of books piled on high-spec, high-capacity roller racks. Your eye falls on one: Michael Foot: A Portrait; a popular loan; you turn the cover page to reveal an inner card stamped almost every month from 1 Feb 1983 to 6 Sept 1992.
Pinned to a wall there are photos of the Swinton Reading Group; each member sits with benign grace, cradling a single open book. A lost world. On another wall there’s a poster with encouraging messages for children and the legend ‘What did You Learn Today?’.
The rather garish curtains of the adjoining theatre still hang, half open, as if the show must go on. On the floor there’s a fallen illuminated light box, ‘SHOW NOW COMMENCING’, and a single sheet of A4 paper with a list of snack prices, ‘Kit Kat 15p’.
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The Swinton library is a source of local consternation and shame. It’s a noisy reminder of a different past. Most libraries have disappeared without a whisper. In my home city of Newcastle in England’s Northeast you can find one or two former libraries in every neighbourhood. There was one around the comer when I first moved here over thirty years ago. I remember it’s quietness, its sense of seriousness, but also its emptiness. Today it is occupied by a dentist and few would guess that a purpose-built library stood there for generations. In gesture found in so many other cites, its closure was soothed by reassurances that something better would replace it. A new library did open, as part of a new swimming pool facility. Within a year or so, it cut its stock and computer terminals crowded the walls. A few years later it disappeared completely and it’s now a gym. There is no visible ruin, no scar on the landscape to point to. Perhaps this is what complete ruination looks like: not a collapsing palace of learning but the whir of a rowing machine and the smile of a dental receptionist.
Library ruins are poignant and painful for reasons that go beyond nostalgia. There is no time machine to take us back to a world before the internet. What we miss, what is ruined, is not a bunch of old buildings, it is a vision of shared advancement; of a public endeavour to learn, study, and improve. We don’t need a time machine but reading H.G. well’s The Time Machine we know why one of its central scenes, the one that nails the decadence and demise of the surface dwelling, dim-witted, pleasure-seeking Eloi into literal fodder for the grisly underground Morlocks, is set in a ruined library. Entering the decayed museum and library the time traveller notices ‘the brown and charred rags that hung from the sides’. It is with horror that we sense what is coming. It is Wells’ nightmare and our reality. ‘I presently recognised’ them …
as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough.
Alastair Bonnett 