Whether we believe it or not, rapid change is upon us. I am searching for grace.





In this time of political fragility, climate chaos and seeking beauty wherever we can find its glimmer, Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians. They are not distant deities, but the ordinary, often overlooked presences - animal, plant, memory, moment - that reveal our interconnectedness with the natural world, as small as an ant ferrying a blossom to its queen or as commonplace as the night sky. But what they can collectively show us - about the radical act of attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds - is immense.





Journeying through encounters with the Glorians in the red rock desert of Utah to Harvard University where she teaches in the Divinity School, Williams weaves a story of astonishing personal and societal insight. Wise and lyrical, The Glorians is a field guide to finding grace in the unexpected and a moving invitation to engage with one another and our surroundings with renewed appreciation.



Terry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of over twenty books of creative nonfiction, including the environmental classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her work has been translated and anthologized worldwide. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts ### Letters and is currently writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Southeastern Utah.



The Glorians is a book like no other I have read. It has the fierceness and strangeness of light returning after an eclipse. It dreams, envisions, desires, suffers, rages. It thinks with small stones, praying mantises, neighbours, driftwood, rituals, rivers, journeys. It moves with a surprising velocity of intent### once you slip into its flow it is hard to stop moving, or to wish to stop moving. At its heart is a "burning core of care," a furnace of compassion stoked by its gathering of "the Glorians" - those mysterious, mundane visitations from what is here unforgettably called "the holy ordinary," which teem around us always but also slip past unseen, unattended to. Here is a book to wake us out of torpor and stupor and set the world's atoms shivering fabulously in their matrix again



I go to Terry Tempest Williams for the reasons I go to Whitman and Thoreau: to recover a capacious spirit and to rejoin the urgent living world. She gives me something bigger than hope



Williams is Whitmanesque in her vision: generous, visionary, multitudinous. This is a wise, tender and often very funny book that asks us to achieve new ways of seeing



Beauty is all around us, or so the cliché goes. Williams, the environmental activist and Harvard Divinity School writer-in-residence, takes it a step further in these reflections on aging, relationships and more: Each ordinary little beauty is connected to each other, and to us



[A] revelatory mix of nature writing and memoir...Evocative and richly personal