Underland
A Deep Time Journey
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4.2 • 21 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Follow Robert Macfarlane to the furthest corners of the globe....
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2019
WINNER OF THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020
'You'd be crazy not to read this book' The Sunday Times
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarlane's long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2020
'Macfarlane has invented a new kind of book, really a new genre entirely' The Irish Times
'He is the great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation' Wall Street Journal
'Macfarlane has shown how utterly beautiful a brilliantly written travel book can still be' Observer on The Old Ways
'Irradiated by a profound sense of wonder... Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly' Independent on Landmarks
'It sets the imagination tingling...like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems' The Sunday Times on The Old Ways
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nature writer Macfarlane (The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot) expands readers' horizons while delving into the various "worlds beneath our feet" in an eye-opening, lyrical, and even moving exploration. His look at the network of roots below London's Epping Forest leads into a discussion of the recent discovery that trees share nutrients with neighboring trees that are ill or under stress, a finding consistent with new ideas about plant intelligence and a "wood wide web" of interconnected plant and fungal life. In another section, Macfarlane descends more than half a mile below the Yorkshire countryside to visit "a laboratory set into a band of translucent silver rock salt left behind by the evaporation of an epicontinental northern sea some 250 million years earlier," where a physicist is searching for proof of dark matter's existence. Here, too, Macfarlane makes counterintuitive concepts fully accessible while capturing the poetry beneath the science, describing the tangible world humans perceive "as mere mist and silk" in relation to dark matter. Perhaps most importantly, he places humanity's time on Earth in a geological context, revealing how relatively insignificant it is. Macfarlane's rich, evocative survey enables readers to view themselves "as part of a web... stretching over millions of years past and millions to come," and deepen their understanding of the planet.
