Amanda Thomson

'Belonging is a quiet book of questions in a genre full of answers, but it is all the more powerful and beautiful for this' -  The Times Literary Supplement

‘Whether writing about nature, about family, about art, or about identity, Amanda Thomson brings a careful and a thoughtful attention to the page. She shows how the threads of a life – its passions and preoccupations – are intricately entangled, each illuminating and complicating the other.’ - Malachy Tallack 

'''A finely-wrought meditation on nature, identity, and the tender hold of the past.' - Dr Samantha Walton, author of Everybody Needs Beauty and The Living World

‘Beautiful without ever being pretentious, Amanda Thomson’s Belonging pays loving homage to Scottish nature and history … Meticulously curated and thoughtfully researched, the book creates vivid impressions of this country. There is something undeniably powerful about her invitation, in a time when people are increasingly obsessed with how we present ourselves online, to look up at the world around us, and to invest conscious thought in the people and places that give life meaning as well as context. As nature writing, Belonging is glorious.’ – The List

‘Belonging is a beautifully written meditation on rural surroundings and [Amanda Thomson’s] place within them.’ The Sunday Times

‘Thomson writes place like no other’ - Kerri Ni Dochartaigh, author of 'Caught by the River'  

‘Amanda Thomson’s new book manages to carve out a distinctive niche for itself … this is a passionate book and infused with a sense of rootedness.’ – The Scotsman

‘A thoughtful and intricate meditation on many things: Scotland’s settlements and how those intertwine with the country’s natural landscape, the connections and disconnections between family and home, and the fine line between what is nature and what is art … a pleasure to read.’ – The Skinny 

'Tender, searching, and dialectically alert, be/longing by Amanda Thomson draws an aesthetic of care. This glorious book is a primer on noticing, a map of intersectional consciousness. “The straightness of the line belies the lay of the land,” she writes, and in this rich metaphorical terrain we enter the understory, the unpath. Each passage pulses with incandescent turns of wonder and pain, like wingbeats stirring the air. In strikingly original takes on Scottish history, environmentalism, Black feminist theory, artmaking, list-making, memory, and memoir, Thomson crafts a cadence that is as wise as it is vitally alive. Reading be/longing, I felt like I belonged. What a gift: to see and love the world even as it hurts, even as it changes. To hold space for hope. “I choose to stay.”' —Margot Douaihy, author of Scorched Grace

'Pays loving homage to Scottish nature and history . . . there is something undeniably powerful about her invitation, in a time when people are increasingly obsessed with how we present ourselves online, to look up at the world around us, and to invest conscious thought in the people and places that give life meaning as well as context . . . belonging is glorious’ – The List 

‘In belonging, Thomson invites us to think about what living with the land really means: not just beautiful and wild places, but cities, suburbs, old houses, the places that shape us in childhood and beyond, too. This is an evocative, intimate journey through the ways we find home – in family, place, history and language’ - Jessica J. Lee