Underland

The highly anticipated new book from the internationally bestselling, prize-winning author of Landmarks, The Lost Words and The Old WaysYoud be crazy not to read this book The Sunday TimesUnderland is a magnificent feat of writing, travelling and thinking that feels genuinely frontier pushing, unsettling and exploratory Evening StandardMarvellous... Neverending curiosity, generosity of spirit, erudition, bravery and clarity... This is a book well worth reading The TimesExtraordinary...

at once learned and readable, thrilling and beautifully written ObserverAttentive, thoughtful, finely honed... I turned the last page with the unusual conviction of having been in the company of a fine writer who is — who must surely be — a good man TelegraphPoetry, science, a healthy sense of the uncanny and a touch of the shamanic are the hallmarks of his writing... This is a journey that tells the story not just of nature but of human nature.

And there is noone I would more gladly follow on it iStartling and memorable, 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 StatesmanDiscover the hidden worlds beneath our feet... In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet.

From the ice-blue depths of Greenlands 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 planets 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 Macfarlanes long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart. Macfarlane has invented a new kind of book, really a new genre entirely The Irish TimesHe 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 onThe Old WaysIrradiated 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 LandmarksIt sets the imagination tingling...like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems The Sunday Times onThe Old Ways.