Description:
"I go to Terry Tempest Williams for the reasons I go to Whitman and Thoreau: to recover a capacious spirit and to rejoin the urgent living world. She gives me something bigger than hope."―Richard Powers, author of The Overstory
From the visionary New York Times bestselling author, a revelatory work of narrative nonfiction exploring beauty in the desert, climate change, and, transformative moments of power in a world beset by uncertainty
Whether we believe it or not, rapid change is upon us. I am searching for grace.
In this time of political fragility, climate chaos, and seeking beauty wherever we can find its glimmer, Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians. They are not distant deities, but the ordinary, often overlooked presences--animal, plant, memory, moment--that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world. The Glorians can be as small as an ant ferrying a coyote willow blossom to its queen or as commonplace as the night sky. But what they can collectively show us--about the radical act of attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds--is immense.
Journeying through encounters with the Glorians in the red rock desert of Utah during the pandemic to Harvard University where she teaches in the Divinity School, Williams weaves a story of astonishing personal and societal insight. As she grapples with the unsettled state of the world, she turns not to despair but to deep reflection. She sees how the Glorians are calling us to attention, not as an army, but as fellow inhabitants of our sacred, threatened home. They remind us of the power of contact between species and the profound courage--and awareness--it will take to dream a more cohesive future into being.
Wise and lyrical, The Glorians is a testament to the power of witness, a field guide to finding grace in the unexpected, and a moving invitation to engage with one another and our surroundings with renewed intention. In a modern world filled with increasing noise and anxiety, Terry Tempest Williams offers honest sustenance for the mind and spirit and distinguishes herself again as a trusted voice to whom we can turn to more fully understand our times.
Review Quotes:
Praise for The Glorians:
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times Book Review, Literary Hub, and Book Riot
Named a Book of the Month by The LA Times, Amazon and Book Riot
"Beauty is all around us, or so the clichéeacute; goes. Williams, the environmental activist and Harvard Divinity School writer-in-residence, takes it a step further in these reflections on aging, relationships and more: Each ordinary little beauty is connected to each other, and to us."-New York Times Book Review, "The Nonfiction Everyone Will be Talking About in 2026"
"'The unsung moments that inspire our actions and beliefs arise often without words--a central drive to being human is to translate those experiences into shared stories that delight, disturb, and heighten our senses.' Here we see the process in which Williams engages throughout this idiosyncratic and deeply moving work."--David L. Ulin, Alta Journal
"There's nobody I trust more than Terry Tempest Williams to be able to braid the ordinary with the holy, the divine with the mundane. She's someone who I've always been able to look to, in the need of regaining a faith in the world, a trust in it . . . Williams points to small moments, and poignant visions, as the representations of our hope, our resilience, our bright and gleaming futures. I know I need that now, more than ever."--Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2026"
"A Glorian, according to Williams--one of our finest writers on the natural world--is a 'moment of grace' when we humans connect deeply with our environment. Her essays include an elegy to her great friend and fellow writer Barry Lopez, a tribute to a beloved lost red oak on the grounds of Harvard Divinity School (where she teaches), and a meditation on having badgers as cemetery caretakers. After reading this, you'll look for more Glorians."--Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times
"That it is not one god but many, that they are not only within us but around us in forests and oceans and microcosms of moss, is what Terry Tempest Williams offers in The Glorians--vespers for a burning world, a rosary of stays against despair threaded with the insistence that 'wildness is the taproot of our consciousness' . . . Laced throughout the book is the lucid, luminous recognition that 'there must be something deeper than hope'--more prayerful, more purposeful, more pulsating with aliveness."--Maria Popova, The Marginalian
"Like Emerson, Williams has established herself as our nation's cartographer of the wild edges of consciousness, and in The Glorians, she turns her gaze toward the 'Holy Ordinary'--the small, often-overlooked encounters that anchor us when the world feels as though it is coming loose from its moorings . . . Without being trite or cliché, The Glorians succeeds in catching sight of the sublime and beautiful amid a people seemingly hell-bent on self-destruction."--John Kaag, American Scholar
"A frank, passionate, knowledgeable, observant, and entrancing writer of conscience . . . After telling poignant and funny stories, lamenting injustice and environmental destruction, and contemplating stars, storms, flash floods, plants, stones, spiders, monarchs, time, love, and resistance, Williams assures us in this exquisite, deeply affecting, spirit-renewing inquiry that 'we can dream a new world into being.'"--Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred)
"In our current time of political turmoil, Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians. She describes them as 'ordinary, often overlooked presences--animal, plant, memory, moment—