New York Times Bestseller
In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.
Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.
“I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take,” Solnit writes in the introduction, “the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past.”
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and the advisory boards of Dayenu and Third Act.
Publication date: May 13, 2025
INTRODUCTION
Backroads and Lifeboats: In Praise of the Indirect, Unpredictable, Slow, Subtle, and Imperfect
VISIONS
A Truce with the Trees
Sky Full of Forests
Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends
Tortoise at the Mayfly Party
In Praise of the Meander
Insurrectionary Aunthood
REVISIONS
Despair Is a Luxury
On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway
Against Centrism and Its Biases
In the Shadow of Silicon Valley
Masculinity as Radical Selfishness
Abortion Is an Economic Issue
Toward a Democracy of Voices
The Storykiller and His Sentences
Feminism Has Just Begun
MORE VISIONS
In Solidarity with the Future
Changing the Climate Story
Climate of Abundance
The Great Transformation
Hope on Far Horizons
Seven Sentences
“This is a book of fierce and poetic thinking—and a guide for navigating a rapidly changing, non-linear, living world.”
—Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life
“With her deep sense of the movement of history, her agile intellect, hope in the possibilities of action and nimble prose, Solnit continues to surprise and delight. This new collection of essays is a tonic in dark times.”
—Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness
“Original, lucid, and ardent, Solnit is an essential observer and interpreter of our most confounding predicaments.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
“One of the delights of reading Solnit is the invigorating sensation of forging new connections between unforeseen topics and ideas. In No Straight Road Takes You There, she absolutely does not disappoint.”
—Shelf Awareness
“A buoyant, historically astute appreciation of political persistence.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The urgent, prescient essays in Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There name social inequities and ecological pains while insisting upon hope.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Like a balletic divertissement, each essay in No Straight Road Takes You There is a piquant exploration of human capability.”
—Heather Scott Partington, Alta
“No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium.”
—Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon
“[N]o writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than Rebecca Solnit.”
—Maria Popova, editor of Marginalian
“Solnit's writing is prose poetry and truly beautiful, her thoughts always exploratory and full of curiosity and wonder, the antithesis of dogma, so that it is impossible not to be carried along on her offbeat philosophical detours.”
—The Guardian
“In her inimitable and inspiring way, Solnit reminds us that social change follows an unpredictable path. Despite all the obstacles, we must not lose sight of the fact that profound transformation is possible”
—Astra Taylor, author of Remake the World
“Rebecca Solnit is a national literary treasure: a passionate, close-to-the-ground reporter with the soul and voice of a philosopher-poet.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost
