Reviews
It's a joy to read, its prose as clear as the light on the Greenland ice-cap. In the past year, I've read three or four books combining travelogue and memoir...this was the best
The Daily Telegraph
Malachy is a fine, sensitive writer with an eye for detail and a talent for descriptive prose
Herald
Tallack does travelogue well, acutely balancing fact and fancy, and he has a nicely febrile line in his own vulnerability'
Guardian
Charts his westward peregrination, veering from Shetland to Northern Canada via Greenland ... in consistently captivating prose
Yorkshire Post
Tallack is the new voice in travel writing; travelling, meeting people meditating on home and belonging
Irish Sunday Independent
Explores the landscapes and the people and highlights themes of wilderness and community. A travelogue of interest and insight
Scots Magazine
It is a brave book in its honesty and self-exposure, I think, and a beautiful book in terms of the subtlety of its thinking and the quality of its descriptive prose, that at times possesses the lucidity of the northern light in which so much of it is set
Robert MacFarlane
A subtle, thoughtful study of life on the sixtieth parallel
Financial Times
‘Malachy Tallack is the real deal, a writer given over to pure curiosity, honest witness and that most precious of gifts, an unselfconscious sense of wonder. Sixty Degrees North reveals, not just a vibrant new voice, but a wise, questioning and highly sophisticated talent’
John Burnside
The high point of the book is the acute and sensitive evocation of the natural world. Tallack’s imagery is apposite without becoming self-consciously poetic. …He does not suffer from naïve romanticism about the north
Times Literary Supplement
If you’re going to bring out a book of this type – and with “North” in the title – you’d better have something important to say and a fresh, exciting way of saying it; the fact that first-time author Malachy Tallack succeeds on both counts is nothing short of remarkable
Scotland on Sunday
It asks big questions about humans and their connection to and impact on the land we live on, but it gets its power from the questions it asks of us as individuals and our own relationship to place
Elsewhere Journal
‘An intimate, brave and honest book, Tallack is definitely a name to look out for in the future’
Press and Journal
A dignified thoughtful and sophisticated blend of travelogue, nature writing, history and memoir
Big Issue
Fabulously well written, gripping and full of emotion as well as humour, this profound memoir is a great read
Scotland Outdoors
Written with a real feeling for place, Tallack certainly packs in plenty of history and notes his encounters with local characters never less than sympathetically
The List
About the Book
'Sixty Degrees North is a story that we tell, both to ourselves and to others. It is a story about where - and perhaps also who - we are.'
The sixtieth parallel marks a kind of borderland. It wraps itself around the lower reaches of Finland, Sweden and Norway; it crosses the tip of Greenland and of South-central Alaska; it cuts the great spaces of Russia and Canada in half. The parallel also passes through Shetland, at the very top of the British Isles.
In Sixty Degrees North, Malachy Tallack explores the places that share this latitude, beginning and ending in Shetland, where he has spent most of his life. The book focuses on the landscapes and natural environments of the parallel, and the way that people have interacted with those landscapes. It explores themes of wildness and community, of isolation and engagement, of exile and memory.In addition, Sixty Degrees North is also a deeply personal book, which begins with the author's loss of his father and his troubled relationship with Shetland. Informed by the journeys described, it moves towards a kind of resolution: an acceptance of loss, and ultimately a love of the place Tallack calls 'home'.
The Author
Malachy Tallack
Malachy Tallack is an award-winning author and singer-songwriter. His first book, Sixty Degrees North, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and his second, The Un-Discovered Islands, was named Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. He is from Shetland, and currently lives in Fife.
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