Under the Stars: A Journey into Light By Matt Gaw

Somebody at Elliott & Thompson seems to have a thing about dimly-lit non-fiction. At the tail end of 2018, the London-based publishers brought out Horatio Claire’s highly evocative and intensely personal “winter journal” The Light in the Dark, in which the author and journalist catalogued his struggles with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) during a wet and gloomy winter in Yorkshire. And now here comes Matt Gaw’s Under The Stars – the story of his quest to reconnect with the night or, as he puts it, “to immerse myself in the different types of light and dark that night has to offer: to feel moonlight on my skin, to see a hard frost of stars across a dark sky, and to understand what effect the ever-increasing blaze of artificial light has on our natural rhythms, and those of other species.”

In order to achieve all this, Gaw sets out to experience night-time conditions across the UK. On a quest to see the stars as clearly as possible, Gaw travels to the Scottish

Dark Sky Observatory in Galloway; then, brilliantly, he spends an evening sitting in a tiny patch of woodland in the middle of a roundabout in suburban Bury St Edmunds. If that makes Under the Stars sound like a light-hearted read, on the whole it is, although it is never flippant.

Under the Stars is very much a piece of New Nature Writing, and, for those who enjoy reading about “cuticle-pale skies” and “beluga pale moons,” there are some richly evocative descriptions to chew on.

Gaw’s prose is highly readable, even when he’s addressing tricky concepts like the distances between planets, but there are occasions when you wish he would dive a little deeper into the topics under discussion. However, by the end of the final chapter Gaw will have you thinking about darkness in a whole new, ahem, light.