After moving with his wife and children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expected to find contentment. It was the goal he had sought - to nest and to find home - after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he found that his tools as a writer were failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with himself. Informed by his travels across the world, the writings of D H Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-today travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world - or are they part of the great lie which is killing it?