‘A very British love-letter to the beauty of flint’
In September we publish Flint, a deeply personal love letter to the magical stone that has fuelled three million years of human development.
It’s by writer and archaeologist Joanne Bourne, who has been in awe of flint as long as she can remember. As the only building stone available, it was all around her in her native Kent – in the fields as well as in the walls of buildings.
Made from the remains of plankton and sea sponges, it is second only in hardness to a diamond. In pre-history it was used to make fire and as a weapon for hunting animals and waging war.
Fusing science, poetry, history and a profound love of landscape, Flint is Bourne’s heartfelt, thoroughly persuasive tribute to this amazing piece of geology.
The Daily Telegraph loved her ‘very British love-letter to the beauty of flint’. It likened it to Henry Petroski’s The Pencil, Anna Pavord’s The Tulip and Simon Garfield’s Mauve as the kind of ‘quirky, enchanting ramble’ which belongs ‘in the niche of the bookshop where authors tell you about a single thing that turns out to contain multitudes’.
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