Clara’s Verdict
Martin Shaw is one of those writers whose work resists easy categorisation, which is probably why it has taken so long for him to find the mainstream audience that Liturgies of the Wild now seems to be bringing him. He is a mythographer, a Christian thinker, and a storyteller in the oldest sense — someone who understands that the stories a culture tells itself determine what that culture is capable of imagining, and therefore what it is capable of becoming. This book, his most accessible and arguably his most urgent, argues that we live in a myth-impoverished age, and that this impoverishment leaves us vulnerable to bad stories: propaganda, tribalism, the hollow narratives of consumption and progress that mistake movement for direction.
Rated 4.5 out of 5 from 41 listeners, published by Ebury Digital in February 2026, this is already one of the most significant non-fiction audiobooks of the year. I say that without reservation. It is the kind of book that changes what you hear when you listen.
About the Audiobook
Shaw draws on his thirty-year career as a storyteller and mythographer, on his deep engagement with the Irish, British, and global mythological traditions, and on a 101-night vigil he undertook alone in a Dartmoor forest — a rite of passage that by any reasonable accounting belongs to another century — to make a case for the redemptive power of initiatory stories. Not myths as entertainment or as cultural heritage, but myths as technologies: structures that carry people through experiences that ordinary language cannot hold.
He teaches listeners how to read a myth the way it wants to be read — not allegorically, not psychologically, but on its own terms, as a living thing with its own intelligence. He retells several myths with striking vitality, the language muscular and exact in the way that old stories demand. And he traces his own unexpected journey to Christianity: arriving, as he puts it, at « the True Myth » not through conventional religious routes but through thirty years of sitting with the old stories and finding that they pointed, finally, somewhere specific.
The comparison to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in the publisher’s description is not merely marketing: Shaw occupies a similar intellectual and imaginative territory — scholarly depth worn lightly, imagination deployed in the service of something larger than fiction — and the erudition in Liturgies of the Wild is carried with the same apparent ease. At eight hours and thirty minutes, this rewards re-listening.
The Narration
Shaw reads his own work, and this is the only way this particular book could function. His voice carries decades of live storytelling — unhurried, layered, with the cadences of someone who has spent a long time understanding what it means to speak aloud in the dark to people who are genuinely listening. The mythological retellings are particularly extraordinary in audio: Shaw has been telling stories to live audiences for thirty years, and the difference between a trained storyteller reading a text and a professional narrator reading the same text is immediately, viscerally audible. One reviewer described the effect as « opening the dusty wardrobe of the mind’s Spare Oom » — an image that captures something true about what a great voice can do to words already worth hearing.
What Readers Say
Forty-one listeners and a 4.5 rating, with reviews uniformly and sometimes rhapsodically enthusiastic. « Balm for the soul, » writes one. « Beautiful and majestic — a must read for everyone who wants to become more human. » Another describes receiving the book and being two chapters in with « something wonderful and deep already forming. » A reader who had long since « relegated myths to the childish things box » writes that the book corrected that error entirely and opened a door she had not realised was there. Shaw’s chapter on death is specifically mentioned by multiple reviewers as something that will stay with them. That is not something you can say about many books.
Who Should Listen?
Those who feel that something important has been lost from contemporary culture but cannot quite name what it is. Readers who have loved the mythological and spiritual dimensions of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, or Joseph Campbell and want something that engages those ideas from a living, Christian-rooted, and explicitly contemporary perspective. People drawn to the rewilding and deep nature movements who want a complementary intellectual and spiritual framework for what they are already sensing. And anyone who has ever sat alone in the dark for long enough to feel that the old stories might have something important to say about the life they are trying to live — which is, perhaps, more of us than we usually admit.
Shaw’s account of his Dartmoor vigil — 101 nights alone in the forest, without the scaffolding of ordinary life — runs through the book as a kind of proof of his authority. He is not theorising about the transformative power of the old stories from a desk; he has sat in the dark with them, and the book is the account of what came back with him. That experiential ground gives Liturgies of the Wild a weight that most books about myth and meaning lack. It is written from the inside of the experience it describes.
Listen to Liturgies of the Wild on Audible UK — discover it here.
