JAY GRIFFITHS

Kith is a passionate examination of what it means to be a child, by Jay Griffiths, the award-winning author of Wild. While travelling the world in order to write her award-winning book Wild, Jay Griffiths became increasingly aware of the huge differences in how childhood is experienced in various cultures. One central riddle, in particular, captured her imagination: Why are so many children in Euro-American cultures unhappy - and why is it that children in many traditional cultures seem happier? In Kith, Jay Griffiths explores these questions and many more. Moving from communities in West Papua and the Arctic to the ostracised young people of contemporary Britain, she asks why we have enclosed our children in a consumerist cornucopia but denied them the freedoms of space, time and deep play. She uses history, philosophy, language and literature to illustrate children's affinity for the natural world and the essential quest element of childhood. Kith is Jay Griffiths' impassioned, illuminating analysis of a universal rite of passage. In its urgent defence of the rights and needs of every child, it is a journey into the heart of human experience.

'I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end - a strangely sweet result - I came back to a wild home...'