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 hope 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 teach 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 all 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.

Praise for The Glorians:

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times Book Review, Literary Hub, and Book Riot
An Amazon Best Book of the Month

“Beauty is all around us, or so the cliché 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 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—that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world.’ This book is truly a masterclass in finding beauty and joy in the unexpected.”—Book Riot

“Mary Oliver gave us instructions for living a life: ‘Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.’ Terry Tempest Williams understood the assignment. In her latest, Williams lifts up the ‘Glorians,’ a word that came to her in a dream in March 2020 . . . Ravens, the glow of apricots, a cup of tea, friendship; all of these are Glorians, the ‘holy ordinary,’ doorways from the natural world that offer us connection with something sacred and profound. Williams’s work, too, is such a doorway, and it is always a pleasure to walk through.”—Book Riot

“In The Glorians, Terry Tempest Williams takes snapshots of the natural and human-made world, exposing time and again the miraculous elements of the mundane . . . The book is both a testament to and a model of bearing witness . . . A guide for how to live in today’s tumultuous times.”—BookPage

“An often-poetic invitation to softness and stillness in troubled times, this nature book is for readers seeking inspiration to reflect and take action.”—Library Journal

“This revelatory mix of nature writing and memoir from conservationist Williams reflects on encounters, which she calls ‘Glorians,’ that reveal the interconnectedness of the natural world . . . Evocative and richly personal, Williams’s writing seamlessly weaves together meditations on mortality, nature, and the modern world. Readers will be inspired.”—Publishers Weekly

“In chapters that range from brief meditations to longer narratives, Williams bears witness ‘to beauty and brokenness, love and grief.’ Marriage, friendship, dreams, ravaging fires, her aging father, the pandemic, all feature in deeply felt pieces . . . An impassioned defense of interconnectedness.”—Kirkus Reviews

“With The Glorians, Terry Tempest Williams has secured her place as one of our greatest living eco-visionaries. This book is the culmination and crescendo of the devotional work of a lifetime—deeply wise, poetic, necessary, brave, transporting, and transcendent.”—V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of Reckoning and The Vagina Monologues

“Williams is Whitmanesque in her vision: generous, visionary, multitudinous. This is a wise, tender, and often very funny book that asks us to achieve new ways of seeing. A glorian is a revelation made flesh and rock and fire and desire. Give me a Terry Tempest Williams world any day: it lights up the very edges of the dark.”—Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

“The Glorians is a book like no other I have read. It has the fierceness and strangeness of light returning after an eclipse. It dreams, envisions, desires, suffers, rages. It thinks with small stones, praying mantises, neighbours, driftwood, rituals, rivers, journeys. It moves with a surprising velocity of intent; once you slip into its flow it is hard to stop moving, or to wish to stop moving. At its heart is a “burning core of care,” a furnace of compassion stoked by its gathering of “the Glorians”––those mysterious, mundane visitations from what is here unforgettably called “the holy ordinary,” which teem around us always but also slip past unseen, unattended to. Here is a book to wake us out of torpor and stupor and set the world’s atoms shivering fabulously in their matrix again.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?

“Feeling her way along the edges of the world’s sorrows, Terry Tempest Williams touches the glory of the earth and its creatures and the grandeur of our capacity to grieve, resist and create. A book that invites dreaming about new ways of living. A vision for a future with hope.”—Stephanie Paulsell, Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies, Emerita, Harvard Divinity School