Across more than a dozen acclaimed works of fiction, readers have become intimate with Lydia Millet’s distinctive voice and sly wit. We Loved It All, her first nonfiction book, combines the precision of fact with the power of narrative to evoke our enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Emerging from Millet’s quarter century of wildlife and climate advocacy, We Loved It All marries scenes from her life with moments of nearness to “the others”— the animals and plants with whom we share the earth. Accounts of fears and failures, jobs and friendships, childhood and motherhood are interspersed with exquisite accounts of non-humans and arresting meditations on the power of story to shape the future. Seeking to understand why we immerse ourselves in the domestic and immediate, turning away from more sweeping views, she examines how grand cultural myths can deny our longing for the company of nature and deprive us of its charisma and inspiration. In a thrilling distillation of experience and emotion, she evinces the familiar sense of feeling both well-meaning and powerless—a creature subject to forces that are baffling in their immensity. The fear and grief of extinction and climate change, Millet suggests, are forms of love that might be turned to resistance. We Loved It All shimmers with curiosity and laconic humour yet addresses with reverence the most urgent crises of our day. An incantatory, bewitching devotional to the vast and precious bestiary of the earth, it asks that we extend to other living beings the protection they deserve—the simple grace of continued existence.

"A profoundly evocative ode to life itself, in all its strange and wondrous and imperiled forms." -- Caitlin Gibson - The Washington Post
"A rigorous, evocative, brilliant bow to life." -- Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing
"We Loved It All is at once lyrical and densely packed, intimate and all-encompassing. It beautifully captures the current moment, in all its terrors and possibilities." -- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
"I love reading Lydia Millet, delight in the pithy observations of her all-seeing eye, and suspect her many admirers will be smitten with this deep-time story of our immersion in Earth’s wild creatures and our hapless modern attempts to escape nature." -- Dan Flores, author of Wild New World and Coyote America
"An altogether unique book that allows you to watch a gorgeous mind at work. There is, quite apart from the magic of her writing, not a single page where you won't learn something new. We Loved It All will leave you breathless." -- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of Lost Companions and When Elephants Weep

Lydia Millet is the author of A Children’s Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten book of the Year. Her first work of short fiction, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.