Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging

HIGHLY COMMENDED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASLE-UKI BOOK PRIZE 2025
LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2025

‘An invigorating cross-pollination of memoir and natural history, both beautifully phrased and delicately structured – this book deserves your time and attention’ Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion.

In Dispersals, she examines the echoes and counterpoints in the migration of plants and people – and the language we use to describe them. Combining memoir, history and scientific research, Lee questions how both plants and people come to belong – or not – and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

‘Contemplative, elegant’ New Statesman

'At once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life’ Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water