Underland: A Deep Time Journey

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With poetic command of language, keen observational gifts, and worldly perspective, Robert Macfarlane seamlessly blends scientific inquiry, nature writing, travelogue, adventure tale, reportage, history, and requiem for our Anthropocenic age. Perceptive, reflective, and educative, Underland is unequivocally one of the year's must-read books; it is a masterful, magnificent work. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com

Hailed as "the great nature writer of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), Robert MacFarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. In Underland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.

In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, MacFarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through “deep time”—the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present—he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk “hiding place” where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. “Woven through Macfarlane’s own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls “the awful darkness within the world.”

Global in its geography and written with great lyricism and power, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. Taking a deep-time view of our planet, MacFarlane here asks a vital and unsettling question: “Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?” Underland marks a new turn in MacFarlane’s long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart. From its remarkable opening pages to its deeply moving conclusion, it is a journey into wonder, loss, fear, and hope. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

“Profound in every sense of the word.” Richard Powers

“I began this book with the thrill of realizing that Robert Macfarlane has over the years and books charted the heights and breadth of human travel before plumbing the depths in this exquisite book about what lies beneath. I ended it with wonder at his ability to evoke so vividly places to which I and probably you will never go, 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

“Underland is a devastating act of witness, a clear, cogent, lyrical examination of the darknesses invisible beneath our feet, both geographical and eschatological; it is blazingly vivid about the terror and grandeur of both the natural world and the consequences of human destructiveness upon the Earth. But the book’s great power comes from Robert Macfarlane’s deliberate turn away from despair and a simple narrative of human evildoing, and toward a more deliberate, loving, and luminous sense of awe.” Lauren Groff

“Robert Macfarlane writes of his astonishing subterranean explorations with such wondrous, indelible power that you remember what he sees as if you saw it yourself. Underland is a profound reckoning with humankind’s self-imperiled position in nature’s eternal order. At once thrilling and soulful, raw and erudite, 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. In turning his attention to the subterranean in Underland, he has delivered his most urgent, universal, and expansive book yet.”  Francisco Cantú

“Beautifully written and wise, this haunting book is a treasure by one of earth’s keenest celebrants. Its unique spell is irresistible.” Diane Ackerman

“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

Robert MacFarlane is the author of best-selling, prize-winning books about nature, place, and people, including Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and (with Jackie Morris) The Lost Words. In 2017 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Cambridge University.