What better time than now to welcome Rebecca Solnit to explore the power of activism, the climate crisis, the pandemic and masculinity through her extraordinary new essay collection No Straight Road Takes You There. In conversation with Adam Biles.

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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.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell's Roses, Recollections of My Non-Existence, which was longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and shortlisted for the 2021 James Tait Black Award, The Faraway Nearby, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism, social change, hope, and the climate crisis. She lives in San Francisco and writes regularly for the Guardian. She lives in San Francisco.