Underland: A Deep Time Journey

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time--from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come--Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.

Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

Robert Macfarlane's best-selling books include Underland, The Old Ways, and Mountains of the Mind. With the artist Jackie Morris he is the coauthor of The Lost Words, The Lost Spells, and The Book of Birds. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence and is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Review Quotes:

"An excellent book--fearless and subtle, empathic and strange."--Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Reading Macfarlane connects us to dazzling new worlds. It's a connection that brings, more than anything else, joy."--Barbara J. King, NPR

"Remarkable... Underland may be [Macfarlane's] masterpiece."--Colin Thubron, New York Review of Books

"One of the most ambitious works of narrative non-fiction of our age."--William Dalrymple, Guardian

"[Macfarlane] seems to metabolize landscape into lyrics as he walks."--Rachel Riederer, Outside

"Through this series of haunting descents, Macfarlane plumbs the strange and alarming ways we've changed the world and resurfaces with revelations about how to orient us to the future, weaving landscape and language together."--Kate Yoder, Grist

"The most impressive exercise of imagination and scholarship I've come across lately....A reader never will forget this journey through geologic time."--Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"With Underland Macfarlane gives us a work of nature writing for the age--and for the ages. Its eloquent but urgent prose reveals our complex relationship with nature while pushing us to think more deeply about earth's sublime underneath."--Amy Brady, Gizmodo

"Profound in every sense of the word."--Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory

"[Robert Macfarlane's] writing is luminous, intense....[B]rilliant notes from the underground."--Huw Lewis-Jones, Nature