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This Can't Be Happening
This Can't Be Happening
Aug 10, 2025 1:52 PM

Author:George Monbiot

This Can't Be Happening

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement.

In the galvanising speeches and essays brought together in This Can't Be Happening, George Monbiot calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the destruction of the living planet, and wake up to the greatest predicament we have ever faced.

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Reviews

Grounding, calming, and quietly revolutionary.

—— Robert MacFarlane

I give daily thanks for Robin Wall Kimmerer for being a font of endless knowledge, both mental and spiritual.

—— Richard Powers

Gathering Moss is fantastic and offers an extraordinary point of view on the natural world

—— Natalie Portman

Soulful, accessible... informed by both western science and indigenous teachings alike ... Kimmerer blends, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet's oldest plants

—— Guardian

Beneath your feet, barely visible to the eye, is another world: a rainforest in miniature ... Read Kimmerer's book and you're unlikely ever again to waste precious gardening time scraping moss from paving stones.

—— Rachel Cooke , Observer

Beautiful ... Her scientific training and knowledge of plants from her Potawatomi heritage create a unique lens, teaching us how to look and watch... Reading this has made me stop to wondrously admire any patch of moss I come across.

—— Quietus

Exhilarating

—— Good Housekeeping

It's an exciting story that will inspire young people to pursue their wildest ambitions, no matter how impossible they may seem.

—— S Magazine

A riveting read from start to finish

—— Trucking

Compelling

—— Choice Magazine

Packed with bizarre, thrilling, stomach-churning anecdotes[...] gives an incredible insight into the mind of an adrenaline junkie, test pilot, father and astronaut which many more than just spaceflight enthusiasts with enjoy

—— BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Exhilarating

—— Sunday Express

After the year we've had on Earth, the prospect of an extended sojourn in space might seem more appealing than usual. Who better to guide us into the cosmos than Tim Peake? [...] Awe-inspiringstuff

—— Evening Standard

An inspiringread about reaching for the stars

—— News Letter

Tim...shows how an ordinary boy from Chichester can achieve extraordinary feats through limitless willpower and ambition

—— Sussex Life

The story of an unremarkable British boy who became a remarkable British astronaut and role model. It's an insight into the hows and whys and wherefores of European spaceflight, with some fun anecdotes of how NASA and the Russian do it as well.

—— The Unconventional Gardener

Full of escapades, Peake's autobiography reads like a Boys' Own adventure

—— The Daily Mirror

True and affecting, elegiac and imminent...The fractured timeline fills each chapter with suspense and surprises, parceled out so tantalizingly that it took disciplined willpower to keep from skipping down each page to see what happens... Franny charts our course through a novel that is efficient and exciting, indicting but forgiving, and hard but ultimately hopeful

—— Washington Post

Gorgeous...A personal reckoning that cuts right to the heart. This beautiful novel is an ode-if not an elegy-to an endangered planet and the people and places we love

—— Literary Hub

A good nautical adventure...The Last Migration moves at a fast, exciting clip, motored as much by love for 'creatures that aren't human' as by outrage at their destruction

—— The Wall Street Journal

An ode to our disappearing natural world

—— Newsweek

You can practically hear the glaciers cracking to pieces and the shrill yelps of the circling terns

—— Vulture

There's a brooding lushness to this novel's prose that belies its stark premise... this keening lament of an adventure is compelling.

—— Hephzibah Anderson , Observer

A fascinating hybrid of nature writing and dystopian fiction... gripping... by merging cli-fi and nature writing, the novel powerfully demonstrates the spiritual and emotional costs of environmental destruction

—— The Economist

I’m a sucker for a complicated narrator, and Franny Stone might be the queen of them all. In this tantalizingly beautiful epic, Franny’s life has been marked by secrets and loss, and so she turns to where she cannot reach: the skies

—— Lauren Puckett , Elle US

Gripping, tender and beautifully done. This novel is as intimate as it is urgent—you emerge thrilled and dazed, but also galvanized to save the planet

—— Anna Funder, author of Stasiland

Visceral and haunting...This novel's prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet's landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates...The Last Migration is a nervy and well-crafted novel, one that lingers long after its voyage is over

—— The New York Times Book Review

Dreamy, elegiac... both an adventure story and a piece of speculative climate fiction, constantly slipping between a kind of literary realism and more magical elements, between moments of domestic drama and sweeping epic... an aching and poignant book, and one that's pressing in its timeliness... It's also a book about love, about trying to understand and accept the creatureliness that exists within our selves, and what it means to be a human animal, that we might better accommodate our own wildness within the world.

—— Fiona Wright , Guardian Australia

Gutting and gorgeous, The Last Migration is an astounding meditation on love, trauma, and the cost of survival. With soulful prose and deep empathy, Charlotte McConaghy weaves parallel stories of a woman and a world on the brink of devastation, but never without hope. Equal parts love letter and dirge, this is a true force of a book that I read holding my breath from its start to its symphonic finish

—— Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild

At a time when it feels like we're at the end of the world, this novel about a different kind of end of the world serves as both catharsis and escape

—— Harper's Bazaar US

This novel is enchanting, but not in some safe, fairy-tale sense. Charlotte McConaghy has harnessed the rough magic that sears our souls. I recommend The Last Migration with my whole heart

—— Geraldine Brooks, Author of March

Powerful...Vibrant...Unique... If worry is the staple emotion that most climate fiction evokes in its readers, The Last Migration - the novelistic equivalent of an energizing cold plunge - flutters off into more expansive territory

—— Los Angeles Times

How far do we have to go to escape our pasts and find ourselves? Charlotte McConaghy’s luminous, brilliant novel, set in a future when wildlife is rapidly becoming extinct, is indeed about loss—but what makes it miraculous is that it is also about both the glimpses of hope and the shattering persistence of love, if we are only brave enough to acknowledge them. Written in prose as gorgeous as the crystalline beauty of the Arctic, The Last Migration is deeply moving, haunting, and, yes, important

—— Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

A lovely, haunting novel about a troubled woman’s quest to follow the last surviving Arctic terns on their southerly migration. As she tries to make peace with the ghosts of her painful past, she must choose whether she herself wants – or deserves – to survive, in spite of everything she, and all humans, have destroyed and lost

—— Ceridwen Dovey, author of In the Garden of the Fugitives

This book is a powerful - and entertaining - corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species.

—— Tim Adams , Guardian

Macdonald has a wonderful gift for exploring the intersection between nature and our experience of it, in writing that is both lyrical and impassioned.

—— Hannah Beckerman , Observer

One of the most beautiful memoirs I've ever read. This story will say with you long after you put the book down

—— Emma Gannon

I just turned the last page (reluctantly!). A bold, often brutal exploration of memory, grief and love. Full of hope and heart. I can't recommend it enough

—— Terri White, author of Coming Undone

A brave, brilliant book that is both beautiful and important. Read it then buy it for all your friends

—— Hello!

Gavanndra's memoir The Consequences of Love is absolutely beautiful. It's compelling, heartbreaking, sweet, honest, fascination. I recommend it HIGHLY. I absolutely LOVED it.

—— Marian Keyes

This stunning exploration of grief is so well written and profoundly moving

—— Good Housekeeping

An elegant study of grief and memory

—— Guardian

Hodge pours heartbreak and love into the pages of a book that never pretends to know the answers, and is all the better for it

—— Sunday Times

An eye-opening snapshot of the fashion world in '90s London

—— Vogue UK
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