Published: 27/08/2020
The award-winning author behind Landmarks, The Lost Words and The Old Ways returns to consider that truly hidden ocean of our landscape: the secrets beneath our feet.
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020
Shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019
From the high peaks of Mountains of the Mind to the lost paths of The Old Ways and the vanishing lexicon of The Lost Words, Robert Macfarlane has traced the way our landscape is fused with language, storytelling and imagination.
Ten years in the making, Underland is his enthralling record of journeys deep into the worlds beneath our feet. From the burial grounds of the Mendip Hills to the hidden catacombs of Paris, and further, to the deep blue, ancient ice of Greenland, Macfarlane explores - through myth, memory and experience – our most feared and venerated spaces of loss, discovery and deep time.
Blending personal memoir, travelogue and nature writing, infused with a powerful ability to read the essential messages about our changing planet and our place within it embedded in the very ground we walk upon, Underland is an astonishing and unforgettable book. Written with lyricism, power and prescience, it brings together the ancient and the urgent in a revelatory examination of an unseen and essential netherworld.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141030579
Number of pages: 512
Weight: 405 g
Dimensions: 197 x 129 x 34 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
a brilliant, thrilling, terrifying work of literature, making me want to think more adventurously and live more deeply. - Amy Liptrot
All Macfarlane's books are urgings to take a closer look at the environment we live in, and at the natural world especially. They are perception-shifters. And with its darker, delving subject matter counter-weighing its lyricism, Underland is a magnificent feat of writing, travelling and thinking that feels genuinely frontier-pushing, unsettling and exploratory - Evening Standard
Robert Macfarlane is a magician with words. In Underland he shows us how to see in the dark. His writing is like a vortex... Once caught, you're pulled deeper and deeper with each page - Andrea Wulf, best-selling author of 'The Invention of Nature'
Devastating, lyrical, blazingly vivid... An examination of the darknesses invisible beneath our feet. The book's great power comes from Macfarlane's deliberate turn away from despair and toward a deliberate, loving, and luminous sense of awe - Lauren Groff
Robert Macfarlane's writing reminds us of the astonishing variety of things you can see when you go at walking speed, and of how strange and rich the world is - Philip Pullman
The great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation - Wall Street Journal
Exquisite. [Robert Macfarlane] evokes so vividly places to which I and probably you will never go, and at the eeriness of the places themselves and the sense of vast scale they restore to us at a time when it can feel like the world has shrunken around us - Rebecca Solnit
An epic descent into a series of underground and underwater landscapes - Financial Times
Beautifully written and wise, this haunting book is a treasure... It reads like a seamless dive, crawl, and trek through deep time, in sense-rich landscapes, accompanied by fascinating views of the human saga. Its unique spell is irresistible - Diane Ackerman
Beautifully and bravely balanced... This is a radical book in every sense. It goes as deep as it can, unafraid of the risk that what it finds will turn everything on its head - The Oldie
Thrilling and soulful, raw and erudite. Robert Macfarlane writes of his astonishing subterranean explorations with wondrous, indelible power... Underland is a profound reckoning with humankind's self-imperiled position in nature's eternal order. It is a book of revelations - Philip Gourevitch
Robert Macfarlane has long provided us with some of the most distinctive and sensitive thinking about how humans understand and experience the terrestrial world. Underland [is] his most urgent, universal, and expansive book yet - Francisco Cantu
What a total delight. Once again, so many enlivening encounters along paths less frequently trod. Macfarlane remains our perfect guide, reminding us there's so much in the world to wonder at - Benedict Allen
Eye-opening, lyrical and moving...capturing the poetry beneath the science. - Publisher's Weekly
Underland is a startling and memorable book, charting invisible and vanishing worlds. Macfarlane has made himself Orpheus, the poet who ventures down to the darkest depths and returns - frighteningly alone-to sing of what he has seen - New Statesman
You'd be crazy not to read this book - The Sunday Times
Marvellous... Neverending curiosity, generosity of spirit, erudition, bravery and clarity... This is a book well worth reading - The Times
Extraordinary... at once learned and readable, thrilling and beautifully written - Observer
You may also be interested in...
“Transportive Magic and Urgent Warnings”
I was taken to deep places I never knew existed and made to feel like I was right there beside Macfarlane, sharing in the otherworldly power of those distant spaces. He masterfully ties his underground journeys... More
“Powerful, poignant, and essential reading”
“Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.”
As he has done with his previous works, such as The Old Ways and Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane...
More
“A poetic beautiful book”
Robert Macfarlane is the master of poetic prose. His latest book Underland follows in the same flow as Landmarks, The Old Ways and The Lost Worlds. It is hugely far reaching from the past to the future from the... More
Please sign in to write a review
Sign In / Register
Sign In
Download the Waterstones App
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?