Underland: A Deep Time Journey (Hardcover)
June 2019 Indie Next List
“I don’t think there is a square mile of ground on this planet where Robert Macfarlane couldn’t dig up a new, wondrous story. Underland continues the tradition of profound storytelling, reflection, and, quite simply, gorgeous writing we have come to expect from him. Macfarlane’s ventures into the underworlds of our planet, both mythical and literal, may amount to his finest work yet, and not just because these are the places that have captivated me most throughout my life. I feel fortunate to be living at the same time as him, knowing that as long as he is writing, there is something to look forward to.”
— Chris La Tray, Fact & Fiction Downtown, Missoula, MT
Summer 2020 Reading Group Indie Next List
“A study of the cultural, geological, and psychological call of the world beneath. From ancient cave paintings to the language of trees, from the catacombs of Paris to the burial mounds of nuclear power plants, McFarlane leads us on a bounding but intimate journey through our past and into our future.”
— Ben Kemper, Rediscovered Books, Boise, ID
Staff Reviews
Underland is an unforgettable journey of the underground, exploring the wonder and history and danger to be found in spaces where humans meet the earth. Macfarlane takes his readers to places they most likely haven’t visited and maybe haven’t even heard of, guided along the way by fascinating people living with and working with these spaces: he visits physicists studying dark matter deep underground, mycologists studying how trees communicate through their root systems, urban explorers in the catacombs of Paris, cavers mapping unseen rivers flowing beneath the earth, ancient artists who painted in caves on the edge of the world, and scientists at the front lines of the climate crisis studying the deep history stored in rapidly melting glaciers. Macfarlane writes with such reverence for these spaces that I also felt a deep sense of awe, for the earth and the amazing things to be seen in and on it. But this book isn’t just about the beauties of nature, it is also about humans, the horrors of our history, the things that we attempt to bury for better or worse, and the ways that humans have changed the landscape itself. Throughout his journey, of the seemingly natural world and the lives of the people who study it and live at its wild edges, Macfarlane demonstrates that there really isn’t a separation between humans and nature, that we are an integral part of and owe an urgent responsibility to the earth.
— From Kelsey's PicksNational Bestseller • New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year” • NPR “Favorite Books of 2019” • Guardian “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” • Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award
From the best-selling, award-winning author of Landmarks and The Old Ways, a haunting voyage into the planet’s past and future.
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.
— Terry Tempest Williams - New York Times Book Review
An excellent book—fearless and subtle, empathic and strange.
— Dwight Garner - The 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
Incantatory…A worthy companion to the historian Simon Schama’s monumental Landscape and Memory.
— Marcia Bjornerud - Wall Street Journal
Brilliant.
— Peter Fish - San Francisco Chronicle
Exquisite.
— Ryan J. Haupt - Science
Quietly prophetic.
— Jedediah Purdy - Atlantic
Profound in every sense of the word.
— Richard Powers
Underland is a devastating act of witness and a clear, cogent, lyrical examination of the darknesses invisible beneath our feet.
— Lauren Groff
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