Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away – logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through – or the roadway lifted above it to streamline the journey. But to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the back roads and the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, which, she argues are key to understanding power and the possibilities of change.

Picking up where Hope in the Dark left off, collected together here are Solnit’s best recent essays about the climate crisis, as well as her broader reflections on women’s rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible, and offering us all a path out of the wilderness.