Listen free for 30 days

  • Strange Harvests

  • The Hidden Histories of Seven Natural Objects
  • Written by: Edward Posnett
  • Narrated by: Roy McMillan
  • Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Strange Harvests cover art

Strange Harvests

Written by: Edward Posnett
Narrated by: Roy McMillan
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $30.70

Buy Now for $30.70

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.

Publisher's Summary

"[Strange Harvests is] an impressive addition to the modern travelogue, painting some of the world's most remote terrain in visceral and sometimes breathtaking prose...an engrossing read." (NPR)

An original and magical map of our world and its riches, formed of the stories of the small-scale harvests of seven natural objects

In this beguiling audiobook, Edward Posnett journeys to some of the most far-flung locales on the planet to bring us seven wonders of the natural world—eiderdown, vicuña fiber, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano, and edible birds' nests—that promise ways of using nature without damaging it. To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities, but to their harvesters they are imbued with myth, tradition, folklore, and ritual, and form part of a shared identity and history.

Strange Harvests follows the journeys of these uncommon products from some of the most remote areas of the world to its most populated urban centers, drawing on the voices of the people and little-known communities who harvest, process, and trade them. Blending history, travel writing, and interviews, Posnett sets these human stories against our changing economic and ecological landscape. What do they tell us about capitalism, global market forces, and overharvesting? How do local microeconomies survive in a hyperconnected world? Is it possible for us to live together with different species? Strange Harvests makes us see the world with wonder, curiosity, and new concern.

©2019 Edward Posnett (P)2019 Penguin Audio

What the critics say

Strange Harvests turns nature’s fairy tales inside out [and] usurps the reader's expectations . . . an impressive addition to the modern travelogue, painting some of the world's most remote terrain in visceral and sometimes breathtaking prose . . . an engrossing read.”—NPR

“Posnett moves from one example to another with moral precision, wryness and a refusal to be discouraged. Stories build subtly and sometimes with sudden drama; all are entangled in complex political, cultural and ecological circumstances . . . The non-human creatures [...] too are heroic.”The Guardian

“A truly remarkable debut, weird, inquisitive and swarming with memorable characters.”The Sunday Times

More from the same

What listeners say about Strange Harvests

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.