
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: 496
Weight: 403 g
Dimensions: 197 x 129 x 34 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Every book by Macfarlane since his first has felt less like a new start than the natural extension of a growing landscape. With Underland, it expands downwards to take in barrows, caves, tunnels and catacombs. The experience is, as always, exhilarating and a little terrifying.' - The Daily Telegraph
'There are some simply wonderful chapters here, combining natural and human history, a love of places and names…' - The Times
'Underland is an epic and occasionally portentous descent into a series of underground and underwater landscapes' - The Financial Times
'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' - The Wall Street Journal
'Macfarlane has shown how utterly beautiful a brilliantly written travel book can still be' - The 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 onLandmarks 'It sets the imagination tingling...like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems' - The Sunday Times on The Old Ways
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?