Underland

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Shortlisted for the Best Nonfiction Audiobook at the New York Festival Radio Awards 2020.
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

From the internationally bestselling, prize-winning author of Landmarks, The Lost Words and The Old Ways

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

© Robert Macfarlane 2019 (P) Penguin Audio 2019

Critics Review

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

User Reviews

Book 3.0
Narration 5.0
3.0
5.0
The reader is excellent and makes the book, which has some interesting sections - especially early on - bearable even when the text tends to ramble. Much of the later section on ice is dull and difficult to follow.
markjarmuz 15/03/2025

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